Inside the Titanic Submersible Voyage That Ended With 5 People Dead

What caused the implosion of the Titanic-bound sub?

Officials have not yet been able to pinpoint a reason for why the expedition turned deadly, and investigations into the cause of the implosion are ongoing.

Cameron raised the possibility that the carbon-fiber composite that the Titan was built with, making it lighter than any other sub doing comparable dives, proved to be its undoing.

The material has “no strength in compression,” the filmmaker, whose numerous expeditions include a solo dive to Challenger Deep—the deepest point of the Mariana Trench—aboard the 24-foot sub Deepsea Challenger in 2012, told the New York Times. “It’s not what it’s designed for.”

Cameron has now said in multiple interviews that the deep-submergence engineering community generally abides by the strictest of certifications and safety protocol. Which, he pointed out, was why nothing like this tragedy had happened before.

“We’ve never had an accident like this,” he told the Times. “There’ve never been fatalities at this kind of depth and certainly no implosions.”

(Originally published June 24, 2023, at 12 a.m. PT)