The missing Titanic-bound submersible containing five crew members will run out of breathable air by 7:08 a.m. ET Thursday, the US Coast Guard has projected.
The vessel, operated by OceanGate Expeditions, vanished Sunday morning in the waters off Newfoundland and officials on Monday said the submersible has a 96-hour supply of “emergency” oxygen.
A Coast Guard spokesperson told NBC News on Wednesday that the Titan’s oxygen reserve is expected to run dry Thursday morning.
Experts theorize that the five-person crew could be making last-ditch efforts to conserve the precious air as the oxygen supply hour countdown descended into single digits.
“It may be that they are conserving oxygen,” Jules Jaffe, a research oceanographer at the University of California, San Diego, who was part of a team involved in finding the Titanic wreckage in 1985, told the outlet.
“If they were imagining that they would run out of oxygen, the smart thing to do would be to reduce your metabolic effort and perhaps lay very still.”
But the daunting clock hasn’t yet deterred rescuers from racing the clock in an attempt to reach the 21-foot submersible before it runs out of vital oxygen.
The French government delivered its Victor 6000, a robot capable of diving 20,000 feet below sea level, to the area Titan vanished at around 6 p.m. Wednesday, with just 13 hours to scan the area for the missing sub.
The unmanned robot — which is one of the few vessels in the world capable of descending to the 12,000-feet-deep resting place of the Titanic — is equipped with a mechanical robot arm that could help drag the Titan back to the surface.
Multiple other agencies have been racing to locate the Titan since it failed to resurface Sunday from its dive to see the wreck of the Titanic around 12,500 feet below sea level in the Atlantic Ocean.
The cramped, five-person sub departed around 8 a.m. but lost connection with its OceanGate surface team just one hour and 45 minutes into its trip.
OceanGate founder and CEO Stockton Rush and British billionaire Hamish Harding are on board, as well as French Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet and Pakistani energy and tech mogul Shanzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son Sulaiman.
In spite of the chilling theories on how the Titan may have imploded during its descent or that it is trapped beneath debris underwater, rescuers remain confident they can still find the crew alive before time runs out.
A Canadian airplane aiding in the search for the submersible detected “banging” Tuesday every 30 minutes in the area where the vessel lost radio contact with its surface ship.
“The fact that we’re hearing banging at 30-minute intervals tells me that the people inside are sending a message that says, ‘We understand that you would be looking for us and this is how you might expect us to react.’ So, it’s very encouraging,” Frank Owen, a former Australian submarine officer, told The Post.
