A titanium-housed underwater camera has been found largely intact, with a $59 SanDisk memory card still holding recoverable data.
More than two years after the sub imploded in the North Atlantic in June 2023, the find gives investigators a rare look at surviving equipment from the disaster.
The device, a SubC Rayfin Mk2 Benthic Camera, was rated to withstand depths of 6,000 metres. The Titan failed at roughly 3,300 metres, so while its lens shattered and internal boards were damaged, the core storage somehow survived.
Inside the casing, engineers found what appears to be a SanDisk Extreme Pro 512GB card. Despite damage to the system’s control electronics, the memory card was untouched.
Investigators from SubC Imaging, the Canadian Transportation Safety Board, and the US National Transportation Safety Board extracted the chip, cloned it, and rebuilt part of the camera’s circuit to gain access.
Once they determined the data encryption was limited to the file system level, the recovery team managed to open the contents using SubC’s own tools. The card contained twelve still photographs at 4,056×3,040 resolution and nine UHD video clips.
None were from the Titan’s final dive. Instead, the material showed workshop and test footage, including images of divers and scenes from the Marine Institute’s ROV facility in Newfoundland.
Science communicator Scott Manley, who first highlighted the discovery, noted that the camera had been configured to offload mission footage to an external drive, which explains why no images from the fatal descent were stored internally.
The OceanGate Titan disaster killed all five people aboard instantly after the carbon-fibre pressure hull catastrophically failed. Experts later concluded that repeated dives weakened the composite structure until it collapsed in milliseconds under the crushing force of 380 atmospheres.
This latest find may not answer lingering questions about the accident, but it shows just how much can endure even in the deep sea’s unforgiving environment and a Céline Dion soundtrack.