Marine Science The University of Washington building in Seattle is a bright, modern four-story building with large glass windows that reflect the bay across the street.
On the afternoon of July 7, 2016, the blockade was gradually taking place.
Under overcast skies, a red light began flashing at the entrance as students, faculty and staff filed out. Eventually, only a few people remained inside, preparing to unleash one of nature’s most destructive forces: the crushing weight of nearly 2.5 miles of ocean water.
In the building’s hyperbaric testing facility, a black pill-shaped capsule hung from a hoist in the ceiling. It was about three feet long and was a scale model of a submersible. Cyclops 2It was developed by local startup Ocean Gate. Its CEO, Stockton Rush, co-founded the company in 2009 as a submarine charter service, anticipating a growing demand for commercial and research trips to the ocean floor. Rush initially bought old steel submarines for exploration, but in 2013 Ocean Gate began designing what the company calls a “revolutionary new manned submarine.” Among the sub’s innovations was a lightweight hull made of carbon fiber that could accommodate more passengers than the spherical cabins traditionally used for deep-sea diving. By 2016, Rush’s dream was to take paying customers to the most famous shipwrecks. TitanicIt lies 3,800 metres below sea level in the Atlantic Ocean.
The engineers are careful Cyclops 2 They plunged the model into a test tank, tip-first, like loading a bomb into a silo, then screwed on the tank’s 3,600-pound lid. They then pumped in water, increasing pressure to mimic a submersible’s dive. When you’re at the surface of the ocean, the air above you weighs 14.7 pounds per square inch (psi). The deeper you go, the more pressure you feel. TitanicAt a depth of 1,000 psi, the pressure is about 6,500 psi. Soon, the pressure gauge in the UW test tank read 1,000 psi, then 2,000 psi, then 5,000 psi, and so on. After about 73 minutes, when the pressure in the tank reached 6,500 psi, there was a sudden roar and the tank shuddered violently.
“We felt it in our bodies,” an Ocean Gate employee wrote in an email later that night. “The building was shaking and our ears were ringing for a long period of time.”
“It scared the hell out of everybody,” he added.
The model collapsed several thousand metres short of the safety margin designed by Ocean Gate.
In the high-risk, high-cost world of manned submersibles, most engineering teams would have gone back to the drawing board, or at least ordered more models for testing. Rush’s company did neither. Instead, within a few months Ocean Gate began building a full-scale submersible. Cyclops 2 The design was based on the implosion model. This submarine design was later Giant,Finally Titanic In 2021, the site was visited again for research. However, almost a year before, on June 18, 2023, Giant He dived into the infamous wreck and it imploded, killing all five crew members instantly, including Rush himself.