Also, a shake-up at Alibaba and a taste of Singapore’s street food.
A missing submersible’s air is running out
An international team of rescuers was racing against time to find a deep-diving submersible with five people on board after it lost contact in the North Atlantic during a tour to explore the wreck of the Titanic.
The submersible, the Titan, is thought to be equipped with less than two days’ worth of oxygen, and as of 1 p.m. Eastern time yesterday, there was probably about 40 hours of breathable air left, the U.S. Coast Guard said.
Contact with the Titan was lost on Sunday more than halfway into what should have been a two-and-a-half-hour dive. The five people on board are Hamish Harding, a British businessman and explorer; Shahzada Dawood, a British-Pakistani businessman and explorer, and his son, Suleman; and Paul-Henri Nargeolet, a French maritime expert who has been on over 35 dives to the Titanic wreck site. Stockton Rush, the chief executive of OceanGate Expeditions, was piloting the submersible, according to the company.
The search for the Titan faces a series of obstacles, and even if it can be found, retrieving it will not be easy. The search area lies more than two miles below the surface, with pressure equal to being beneath a 100-story tower of solid lead.
Dangerous tourism: OceanGate Expeditions has provided tours of the Titanic wreck since 2021 for a price of up to $250,000 per person, as part of a booming high-risk travel industry. Leaders in the submersible-vehicle industry sent a letter in 2018 to the company’s chief executive warning that “the current ‘experimental’ approach” of the company could result in “catastrophic” problems.
“There are so many things that can go wrong,” our colleague William Broad, who has been down in a similar submersible, said. “Communications can go out, as is clearly the case with the Titan submersible. The scarier, worse things are the nonelectrical mechanical breakdowns, for instance when the propellers that move the submersible around stop working.” Or, he added, if the ballast won’t drop, then you can’t get back to the surface.
Harding acknowledged in a 2021 interview that he had taken on deep-sea missions in the past knowing that rescue would not be an option. “If something goes wrong, you are not coming back,” he said.A shake-up at Alibaba
The Chinese tech giant’s chairman and chief executive, Daniel Zhang, will leave his post, Alibaba announced yesterday. Two long-serving executives will take over the top positions, while Zhang will serve only as chief executive of the company’s cloud computing division.
