A robotic diving vehicle deployed from a Canadian ship discovered a debris field from the submersible Titan on Thursday morning on the seabed some 1,600 feet (488 meters) from the bow of the Titanic, 2 1/2 miles (4 km) beneath the surface, in a remote corner of the North Atlantic, U.S. Coast Guard Rear Admiral John Mauger told reporters.

The Titan, operated by the U.S.-based company OceanGate Expeditions, had been missing since it lost contact with its surface support ship on Sunday morning about an hour, 45 minutes into what should have been a two-hour dive to the world’s most famous shipwreck.

Five major fragments of the 22-foot (6.7-meter) Titan were located in the debris field left from its disintegration, including the vessel’s tail cone and two sections of the pressure hull, Coast Guard officials said. No mention was made of whether human remains were sighted.

“The debris field here is consistent with a catastrophic implosion of the vehicle,” Mauger said.

Even before the Coast Guard’s press conference, OceanGate issued a statement saying there were no survivors among the five men aboard the Titan, including the company’s founder and chief executive officer, Stockton Rush, who was piloting the Titan.

The four others were British billionaire and explorer Hamish Harding, 58; Pakistani-born businessman Shahzada Dawood, 48, and his 19-year-old son, Suleman, both British citizens; and French oceanographer and renowned Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet, 77, who had visited the wreck dozens of times.

“These men were true explorers who shared a distinct spirit of adventure, and a deep passion for exploring and protecting the world’s oceans,” the company said. “Our hearts are with these five souls and every member of their families during this tragic time.”

Search teams and support personnel from the U.S., Canada, France and Britain had spent days scanning thousands of square miles of open seas with planes and ships for any sign of the Titan.

Intense worldwide media coverage of the search largely overshadowed the aftermath of a far greater maritime disaster stemming from the wreck of a migrant vessel off the coast of Greece last week, killing hundreds of people.

Sounds From The Deep

Mauger said it was too early to tell when Titan met its fate. Search teams had sonar buoys in the water for more than three days in the area without detecting any loud, violent noise that would have been generated when the submersible imploded, Mauger said.

But the position of the debris field relatively close the shipwreck and the time frame of the last communication with the Titan seemed to suggest the failure occurred near the end of its descent on Sunday.

The U.S. Navy separately acknowledged that an analysis of its own acoustic data had detected “an anomaly consistent with an implosion or explosion” near the submersible’s location when its communications were lost.

“While not definitive, this information was immediately shared” with commanders of the search mission, a senior Navy official said in a statement first quoted by the Wall Street Journal.

The Journal, citing unnamed U.S. defense officials, said the sound was picked up by a top-secret system designed to detect enemy submarines.

In an interview with Reuters on Thursday, filmmaker James Cameron, who directed the Oscar-winning movie “Titanic” and has ventured to the wreck in submersibles himself, said he learned of the acoustic findings within a day, and knew what it meant.

“I sent emails to everybody I know and said we’ve lost some friends. The sub had imploded. It’s on the bottom in pieces right now. I sent that out Monday morning,” he recounted.

Sonar buoys dropped by aircraft had picked up some sounds on Tuesday and Wednesday that temporarily offered hope that the Titan was still intact and that its occupants were alive and trying to communicate by banging on the hull.

But officials said analysis of the sound was inconclusive and that the noises probably emanated from something else.

“There doesn’t appear to be any connection between the noises and the location on the sea floor,” Mauger said on Thursday.

Remote-Controlled Vehicles

Robotic craft on the seabed will continue to gather evidence, Mauger said, but it was not clear whether recovering the victims’ remains will be possible given the nature of the accident and extreme conditions at those depths.

“We will begin to demobilize personnel and vessels from the scene over the course of the next 24 hours,” the admiral said.

The search had grown increasingly desperate on Thursday, when the submersible’s estimated 96-hour air supply had been expected to run out if the Titan were still intact, a countdown that proved irrelevant.

The RMS Titanic, which struck an iceberg and sank during its maiden voyage in 1912, killing more than 1,500 people aboard, lies about 900 miles (1,450 km) east of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and 400 miles (640 km) south of St. John’s, Newfoundland.

The undersea expedition to the wreck, which OceanGate has been operating since 2021, cost $250,000 per person, according to the company’s website.

Questions about Titan’s safety were raised in 2018 during a symposium of submersible industry experts and in a lawsuit by OceanGate’s former head of marine operations, which was settled later that year.

The sweeping search covered more than 10,000 square miles of ocean. On Thursday, the deployment of two specialized deep-sea robot vehicles expanded the search farther into the ocean’s depths, where immense pressure and pitch-black darkness complicated the mission.

The fate of the tourist submersible captured global attention in part due to the mythology surrounding the Titanic. The “unsinkable” British passenger liner has inspired both nonfiction and fiction accounts for a century, including the blockbuster 1997 “Titanic” movie, which rekindled popular interest in the story.

The U.S. Coast Guard on Thursday said there were no survivors after the catastrophic implosion deep in the North Atlantic.

The search for the submersible — as well as any clues to explain what happened underwater — was ongoing Thursday after a deep-sea robot found debris near the Titanic shipwreck. Rear Adm. John Mauger, of the First Coast Guard District, said search efforts will continue but that the prospect of finding or recovering remains was unknown.

The Titan was reported overdue Sunday night about 435 miles (700 kilometers) south of St. John’s, Newfoundland, according to Canada’s Joint Rescue Coordination Center, spurring a desperate international rescue effort. Rescuers raced against the clock because it was feared the oxygen supply could run out by approximately 6 a.m. Thursday.

The expedition featuring the Titan was led by OceanGate, making its third voyage to the Titanic, which struck an iceberg and sank in 1912, killing all but about 700 of the roughly 2,200 passengers and crew.

A pilot and four other people were on the Titan. They were:

Stockton Rush

Although his background is in aerospace and technology, Rush founded OceanGate Inc. in 2009 to provide crewed submersibles for undersea researchers and explorers, according to the company’s website. Rush was the Titan’s pilot, said company spokesperson Andrew Von Kerens.

The private company based in Washington started bringing tourists to the Titanic in 2021 as part of its effort to chronicle the slow deterioration of the wreck.

“The ocean is taking this thing, and we need to document it before it all disappears or becomes unrecognizable,” Rush told The Associated Press in 2021.

In an interview with CBS News last year, Rush defended the safety of his submersible but said nothing is without risk.

“What I worry about most are things that will stop me from being able to get to the surface — overhangs, fish nets, entanglement hazard,” he said, adding that a good pilot can avoid such perils.

Rush became the youngest jet transport rated pilot in the world at age 19 in 1981, and flew commercial jets in college, according to his company biography. He joined McDonnell Douglas Corp. in 1984 as a flight test engineer. Over the past 20 years, he oversaw the development of multiple successful IP ventures.

Greg Stone, a longtime ocean scientist and a friend of Rush, called him “a real pioneer” in the innovation of submersibles.

“Stockton was a risk-taker. He was smart. He was, he had a vision, he wanted to push things forward,” Stone said Tuesday.

Hamish Harding

A British businessman, Harding lived in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. Action Aviation, an aircraft brokering company for which Harding served as chairman, said he was one of the mission specialists, who paid to go on the expedition.

Harding was a billionaire adventurer who held three Guinness World Records, including the longest duration at full ocean depth by a crewed vessel. In March 2021, he and ocean explorer Victor Vescovo dived to the lowest depth of the Mariana Trench. In June 2022, he went into space on Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket.

“Both the Harding family and the team at Action Aviation are very grateful for all the kind messages of concern and support from our friends and colleagues,” the company said in a statement.

In a Facebook post Saturday, Harding said he was “proud” to be part of the mission.

“Due to the worst winter in Newfoundland in 40 years, this mission is likely to be the first and only manned mission to the Titanic in 2023,” he posted. “A weather window has just opened up and we are going to attempt a dive (Sunday).”

Harding was “looking forward to conducting research” at the Titanic site, said Richard Garriott de Cayeux, the president of The Explorers Club, a group to which Harding belonged.

Shahzada And Suleman Dawood

Father-and-son Shahzada and Suleman Dawood were members of one of Pakistan’s most prominent families. Their family had said in a statement that they were both aboard the vessel.

Their firm, Dawood Hercules Corp., based in Karachi, is involved in agriculture, petrochemicals and telecommunication infrastructure.

Shahzada Dawood also was on the board of trustees for the California-based SETI Institute that searches for extraterrestrial intelligence. The Dawoods lived in the UK, according to SETI.

Shahzada Dawood was also a member of the Global Advisory Board at the Prince’s Trust International, founded by Britain’s King Charles III to address youth unemployment.

He had degrees from the University of Buckingham in the United Kingdom and Philadelphia University (now Thomas Jefferson University) in the U.S.

Condolences poured in from Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry, government officials, friends and ordinary Pakistanis. Pakistani TV stations halted their routine broadcasts and shared the news. Salman Sufi, an adviser to Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif, wrote on Twitter: “Very sad and unfortunate news. Prayers for the families of deceased. Mr Dawood and family are in our prayers.”

Paul- Henry Nargeolet

Nargeolet was a former French navy officer who was considered a Titanic expert after making multiple trips to the wreckage over several decades.

He was director of underwater research for E/M Group and RMS Titanic Inc., had completed 37 dives to the wreck and supervised the recovery of 5,000 artifacts, according to his company profile.

RMS Titanic, Inc., the company that owns the salvage rights to the Titanic shipwreck, mourned the longtime employee known as “PH.”

“The maritime world has lost an iconic and inspirational leader in deep-sea exploration, and we have lost a dear and treasured friend,” the company said in a statement Thursday.

Friend and former colleague Matthew Tulloch said Nargeolet loved his work from the time they first collaborated in the 1990s up until Nargeolet’s death.

“I never got the impression that he was looking forward to retirement,” Tulloch said with a small laugh. “You sort of think of people as they retire, then they can go on and do things that they love to do. This was exactly that for him — I can’t think of anything that I’m aware of that he would enjoy doing more than traveling around and sharing information and his experiences with people.”

Nargeolet was expedition leader on the most technologically advanced dive to the Titanic in 2010, which used high-resolution sonar and 3D optical imaging on the Titanic’s bow and stern sections as well as the debris field.

While with the French Institute for Research and Exploitation of Sea, he led the first recovery expedition to the Titanic in 1987.