The tragedy occurred during a 10-hour expedition to explore the wreck of the Titanic in which all five passengers aboard the Titan submersible were killed.
Authorities further stated that the bodies of the five victims may never be found. Before the news was announced, some experts said that if the bodies of the victims were kept in an airtight environment without oxygen, they might become mummies.
Forensic experts told Insider that there have been no studies, and little precedent, for finding intact bodies in enclosed spaces, such as ship hulls, under high pressure.
Nicholas Passalacqua, director of the forensic anthropology program at Western Carolina University, speculates that if five passengers on the Titan died while the ship was intact, their bodies would have miraculously been preserved.
Melissa Connors, director of the Center for Forensic Investigative Research at the University of Colorado at Mesa, said the two main factors driving the decomposition are temperature and oxygen.
"The hotter the temperature, the faster the body breaks down, and without oxygen, the bacteria can't grow," she said. In colder temperatures, the bacteria don't have oxygen, and the body dries out through a process. This process is called sublimation, in which water changes from a solid to a gaseous state. "So the mummy could be the end," she said.
However, many opinions indicated that finding the bodies of the five Titan shipwreck victims was very difficult.
Submarine expert Ofer Kite said in an interview that the submersible must have been reduced to "dust" after it exploded. He added that the pressure chamber the passengers were sitting in could also explode because it couldn't hold the pressure.
He predicts that an explosion could occur within 1/1000th of a second (or even nanoseconds) when something pierces the hull and causes a loss of pressure. As a result, the five passengers died so quickly that they "didn't even know what happened."
"They never know it's happening ... it happens instantaneously — before the brain sends some sort of message to the body that they're in pain," he said. "In this negative situation, it's actually very positive."
Former Royal Navy submariner David Russell also predicted the victims could have been sitting in the hull under stress and the explosion killed them "immediately".
"The only consolation was that they didn't have to suffer for days," said David Mearns, a diving expert and friend of two of the five passengers.
