Full list of lost submarines that have disappeared in the last century
The ARA San Juan and La Minerve are two of the submarines that have disappeared in the past century. The Titan is the latest deep sea vessel that was lost.
On Thursday, OceanGate confirmed through an official statement, the death of the five passengers who were on board the Titan submersible. The vessel descended into the waters of the Atlantic Ocean to view the wreckage of the RMS Titanic, one of the best-known ocean liners in history. Last Sunday, communication with the Titan was lost, and despite the efforts of the authorities, nothing could be done to save them.
This tragedy is the latest addition to the list of disappearances of deep sea vessels. Throughout history, accidents have occurred on several occasions that have led to the sinking of various submarines.
These are the submarines that have disappeared in this century
ARA San Juan Submarine
In 2017, the German-made submarine ARA San Juan had an electrical problem that caused a fire outbreak. This occurred at the time when the ship was heading to its base, located on the Atlantic coast. The 220-foot-long submarine stopped communicating with the Argentine Navy, to whom it had to report, on Wednesday November 15, 2017, according to National Geographic.
They lost contact barely eight hours after one of the top officials in charge of the ship reported that a fire had broken out in one of the battery compartments. This would have been due to the entry of water through the ventilation system. Nothing was known about this ship for a year, until November 17, 2018, when it was located at a depth of almost 3,000 feet. 44 people lost their lives in that accident.
Kursk submarine
On August 12, 2000, a Russian navy submarine named Kursk had two internal explosions during a military exercise in the Barents Sea and it sank, taking the lives of 118 people who were on board the ship. This submarine was large, measuring a little more than 500 feet. Great efforts were made to rescue the people trapped inside, to no avail.
According to information given by El Tiempo, despite the fact that the submarine was located in the early morning of August 13 with the possibility of rescuing 23 people still alive, the go-ahead to carry out international rescue operations was not given up to a week later. Over time, it was determined that a torpedo in poor condition was the cause of one of the biggest maritime catastrophes.
The list of missing submarines in the 20th century
La Minerve submarine
This is probably one of the most famous cases in terms of disappearances of submarines. In January 1968, the French submarine, which had 52 people on board, sank in just four minutes in the Mediterranean Sea. This ship, which weighed 800 tons and could submerge up to 1,700 feet deep, was going to carry out exercises off the coast of Toulon with a Breguet Atlantic plane that had departed from the Nimes-Garons base. Their aim was to find out which of the two means of transport would be the first to spot the other.
After making the first contact at 7:19 a.m., barely 18 minutes later, the submarine began to have problems due to the state of the sea and confirmed difficulties in being able to communicate. Eight minutes after that, the plane transmitted that it was going to cancel the last radar check that was scheduled on the agenda for that day. At 7:55 a.m., the submarine would send its last message, and the aircraft, after replying, would never receive a response.
After the search began on January 28, 1968, it stopped on February 2 of that same year. A year later, they tried to search again for 13 days, but the case was finally closed and classified. Half a century had to pass before there was news of the submarine. In 2018, A French team found La Minerve, which was 7,800 feet deep and 27 miles off the coast of Toulon.
USS Scorpion Submarine
Also in 1968, the submarine USS Scorpion sank. The ship had participated in missions for both the United States and NATO from 1961 until the time it disappeared. This was an attack ship and was launched into the water on December 19, 1959. At the time it sank, the nuclear-powered submarine had 99 men on board and was last seen in the North Atlantic.
The USS Scorpion, which was one of four nuclear submarines to have disappeared at sea, was located just five months later. It was at a depth of 9,800 feet (3,000 meters), and the reasons for its sinking have not yet been fully clarified, keeping its disappearance a mystery.
U-3523 submarine
This is another of the most shocking cases. U-3523, a Nazi submarine, was sunk on May 6, 1945 by the B24 Liberator airplane in the Skagerrak Strait. Its disappearance, as TV Azteca points out, unleashed a multitude of rumors, thus fueling the conspiracy theory that indicated that the party’s leader, Adolf Hitler, could have fled to South America after his defeat in the Second World War.
However, after many investigations over the years, this mysterious submarine was located in April 2018 in northern Denmark. Because of this development, the rumors that Hitler had fled far from the European continent after the fall of Germany in the last days of World War II were put to rest.