Hope eternal - It is a human trait to believe in survival despite all odds

The discovery of wreckage from the Titan submersible last Thursday on the North Atlantic seabed close to the wreck of the Titanic ended a five-day vigil of hope.

- Andrew Anthony

The chances of rescuing the five occupants of the missing sub always appeared slight, but it was perhaps the unlikeliness of that outcome that increased the appetite to see it realised.

In the era of 24-hour news, few events grab the public imagination quite as firmly as a real-time people-in-peril story. And it's difficult to imagine a more extreme or unpleasant peril than being trapped in the deep sea in a craft the size of a minivan, as the oxygen supply runs out.

That was the scenario that the world imagined that the five men - British businessmen Hamish Harding and Shahzada Dawood and Dawood's 19-year-old son Suleman, American Stockton Rush, the chief executive of OceanGate, which ran the tour, and French explorer Paul-Henry Nargeolet, a veteran of about 30 dives - were facing.

But it seems that the Titan suffered a catastrophic implosion at the moment it lost communication with its mothership and the transponder signalling its position also stopped working. James Cameron, who directed the film Titanic, said he knew what had taken place the instant he heard about the dual failures.