The submarine Titan has been confirmed missing.
There’s tragic poetry in the wreckage of a ship found 1,700 feet from the Titanic’s bow, a watchword for a disaster at sea that has been the subject of fascination since its sinking in the North Atlantic in 1912.
Many questions have been raised about every thing that led to the loss of the Titan and the five souls overseas, perhaps most significantly: What were they considering? How could they take such an enormous risk?
They were locked in a cramped 22-meter long ship, equipped with just enough oxygen for a number of days, which could go deeper than almost anything that might save them if something went improper. Why try this?
For the same reason, people from time immemorial have been forced to navigate the sea and enterprise below its surface at any time when possible.
The quest for adventure, profit, survival and freedom has long motivated these nautical endeavors, and crazy risk-taking has often been part of the deal.
![Titan submarine](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/06/NYPICHPDPICT000013071554-1.jpg)
We rightly salute Ferdinand Magellan, but a cursory glance at his famous 1519 round-the-world voyage—revolts, horrific deaths, dangerous land trips—is enough to comprehend that he didn’t operate on a standard profit and loss account.
Indeed, he died in battle on an island in the Pacific. The survivors and ships have returned from this epic voyage almost three years after it began.
In fact, not only Europeans traveled great distances.
European sailors in the sixteenth century, as described by Lincoln Paine in his masterpiece “Sea and Civilization”, were shocked by the size of the Pacific, in addition to the indisputable fact that most of the small islands dotting the vastness were inhabited.
![John Mauger, commander of the Coast Guard's First District, speaks at a press conference at the U.S. Coast Guard base in Boston, Massachusetts.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/06/NYPICHPDPICT000013067333.jpg?w=1024)
One officer wondered about the people on the distant Tuamotu Islands: “Who the hell went and put them on a small sandbank like this and up to now from the mainland as they’re?”
In fact, nobody put them there – they got there on their very own.
Almost three-quarters of the Earth’s surface is water, which is of great economic and geostrategic importance.
In keeping with the National Ocean Service, “In 2017, the U.S. shipping system moved $1.6 trillion price of cargo through U.S. seaports to and from our international trading partners.”
![A view of the infamous wreck of the Titanic, created using deep sea maps by Atlantic/Magellan.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/06/NYPICHPDPICT000011291212-6.jpg?w=1024)
As Lincoln Paine points out, without her involvement in what she calls “the maritime enterprise,” we’d never have witnessed the emergence of Western Europe.
Today, who ultimately controls the Taiwan Strait can ultimately help determine the future of the world.
Nonetheless, the centrality of the seas to the modern world is straightforward to forget, as Greg Easterbrook points out in his book The Blue Age.
Huge container ships, the lifeline of the world economy, are mostly invisible unless you reside near a port. No one thinks about the undersea cables that run the Web. Pipelines under the ocean are similarly invisible.
For all its usefulness, the sea is a hostile and unforgiving environment.
The great artist of the sea, British painter JMW Turner, evokes in his works the overwhelming power of the oceans and the terror when things go improper.
There isn’t a margin of error at great depths.
The US submarine Thresher suffered a cascade of failures and imploded at about 2,300 feet during dive testing in 1963.
The implosion lasted just one/twentieth of a second, “too fast for people in the submarine to acknowledge it cognitively”, as an article in Naval History Magazine puts it.
The debris field spread across 33 acres of the ocean floor.
Lincoln Paine quotes a matter-of-fact, pitiless epigram from ancient Greece:
All sea is sea…
Pray should you want a superb trip home
But Aristagoras, buried here, found it
The ocean has the manners of the ocean.
Twitter: @RichLowry