The Ocean Gates Expeditions company, whose submarine Titan is missing, had planned a tourist expedition in the Azores for May 2024, according to the company’s expedition program, to observe hydrothermal vents.
The three-day expedition in the Azores included diving aboard the submarine Titan, which disappeared into the North Atlantic on Sunday as it descended to visit the Titanic’s wreckage, which sits at a depth of about 3,800 metres.
The search and rescue operation to find and recover the submarine, which has five people on board, reached a critical stage on Thursday as oxygen reserves are running low.
In promoting the trip to the Azores, the company truly considers the archipelago’s “deep waters to be one of the best dive sites in the world.”
The company marks as attractions of the archipelago the “a variety of deep-sea corals, one of the most diverse whale populations in the world, and the bizarre life forms that surround the hydrothermal vents”.
“While the Azores have been popular with SCUBA divers for decades, exploring the area during a deep dive on OceanGate’s Titan submersible will open a new era for exploring this underwater gem”says the company.
The Azores have become one of the world’s centers of scientific research and scientific tourism due to the richness of their marine ecosystems, including the “Lucky Strike” hydrothermal vent field.
In June 2018, a scientific expedition discovered a new hydrothermal field off the coast of the Azores, the first with exclusively Portuguese resources and also the shallowest of all eight known fields in the Azores.
Lusa tried to get comments from Ocean Gates Expeditions about the Azores expedition, but without success.
Source: DN
