EXCLUSIVE: Coroner warns human remains of five Titan sub victims will likely NEVER be found alongside newly-discovered wreckage because of powerful implosion and sea creatures who’d eat any remains

• Richland County Coroner Naida Rutherford told DailyMail.com remains are ‘unlikely’ to be recovered 
• Huge chunks of debris from the Titan submersible have been brought back by the Polar Prince 
• Professor Christopher Viney, from UC MERCED, said the location of the five men on the submersible could have impacted how they died

A coroner has warned that the remains of the Titan Five are unlikely to ever be recovered – despite large parts of submersible wreckage being brought to the surface for investigation.

Pictures snapped Tuesday show huge chunks of metal being unloaded from the Horizon Arctic ship at the Canadian Coast Guard pier in St John’s, Newfoundland, Canada, this morning.

But experts say the chances of recovering corpses are very slim, because the five men aboard the sub were almost certainly instantly obliterated when it imploded. 

Authorities were quick to cover the debris with tarpaulins before they were taken away for assessment – with some appearing to be parts of the external cover and landing frame.

CEO of OceanGate Stockton Rush, French Navy veteran Paul-Henri (PH) Nargeolet, British billionaire Hamish Harding, Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman, 19, were instantly killed when the vessel malfunctioned.

Richland County Coroner Naida Rutherford told DailyMail.com says there’s still little chance of human remains being recovered for the victims’ families to bury or cremate

Despite large chunks of the wreckage being recovered, Richland County Coroner Naida Rutherford told DailyMail.com says there’s still little chance of human remains being recovered for the victims’ families to bury or cremate. 

She said: ‘When you have any sort of explosion or implosion, there are remains or traces of remains.

‘There is a possibility but given the environment that this happened in it is highly unlikely that they will find remains.

‘Even on land you have animal activity, and in an expansive ocean, so many animals and creatures, and the pressure down there.

‘I think it is unlikely to find remains, certainly in whole parts. It would be very difficult to ID the remains given the conditions in which the implosion happened – and it will be difficult to ascertain who they belonged to.

‘Their bodies would have sustained extensive thermal damage and blunt force trauma from the implosion. Those are things we know as fact.’

The US Coast Guard confirmed last week that those on board the submersible would have died ‘instantly’ – but confirmed they were unsure on the ‘prospects’ for recovering remains.

An investigation has been launched into the cause of the underwater implosion that destroyed Titan.

The front-end of Titan, where its viewing port was located, was clearly identifiable among the sections which have been recovered

Experts repeatedly raised safety fears about the submersible, Titan, before the tragedy

The huge chunks of metal were unloaded from the Horizon Arctic ship at the Canadian Coast Guard pier in St John’s, Newfoundland, Canada, this morning

Several large pieces of the vessel have been recovered from the ocean, but other sections are believed to have been decimated by the implosion

A debris field was found on the seafloor, 1,600 feet (500 meters) from the bow of the Titanic, which sits more than two miles (nearly four kilometers) below the ocean’s surface and 400 miles off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada.

Canada, which helped in the search for the submersible, said Saturday it was carrying out its own probe.

The Canadian-flagged Polar Prince cargo vessel towed the Titan out to sea last weekend but lost contact with it about an hour and 45 minutes after the submersible launched into the ocean depths.

The announcement of the implosion ended a multinational search-and-rescue operation that captured the world’s attention since the tourist craft went missing

Professor Christopher Viney, from University of California MERCED in the department of Materials Science and Engineering, told DailyMail.com that the location of the five men on the submersible could have impacted how they died.

Shahzada Dawood, 48, one of Pakistan’s richest men, who along with his teenage son Suleman Dawood, 19, (together, left) died on the Titan along with British explorer Hamish Harding (right)

Stockton Rush, the CEO of OceanGate, which launched, Titan, perished on board the submersible last Sunday along with his four passengers, including PH Nargeolet (right)

Titan went missing on Sunday, June 18 during a mission to the Titanic’s wreckage

He said: ‘The word catastrophic means different things to different people. It doesn’t mean that it was completely crushed to smithereens to engineers, and that you aren’t going to find anything at all.

‘To engineers it means that it is irreversibly bad, with no survivors. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that it fell into tiny pieces – the integrity is breached and then the pressure on the outside comes into the inside.

‘It doesn’t have to fall apart. A hole will allow it to fill up with water pretty quickly, which could cause some crushing of the hull.

‘If you were not killed by the crushing and the carbon fiber coming in, then you would be killed by the water.

‘Someone sitting by the caved in portion may have been crushed by that, and someone further away may not have been.

They were quickly covered in large tarpaulins before being lifted by cranes on to trucks that took them away for assessment

Titan’s carbon fiber hull and its acrylic viewport were subject to several warnings and James Cameron singled them out as ‘potential failure points’ on the vessel

‘The images don’t show it as being uniformly crushed. The only way to know is to replicate it, to scale, and see what happened by putting it back together again.

‘Hopefully, people learn lessons from this as it sounds very much like they were warned by the experts that the hull made of carbon fiber would cause an issue.’

Safety fears were repeatedly raised by experts who said the vessel was not suitable for the immense depths it traveled to.

Critics said its carbon fiber hull was not fit for purpose and also raised the alarm about its clear viewport, which was not certified to such depths.

Leaders of the Manned Underwater Vehicles committee of the Marine Technology Society, sent a letter to OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush urging him to take caution.

The letter, obtained by the New York Times, warned that ‘the current ‘experimental’ approach’ of the company could result in problems ‘from minor to catastrophic.’

A large circular piece of the Titan, which is similar to the sections at each end of the hull, was also retrieved

Will Kohnen, chairman of the professional group the Marine Technology Society Submarine Committee, added that he believed that the implosion would mean the submersible was gone ‘in a fraction of a second’.

He told DailyMail.com: ‘It implodes inwards in a matter of a thousandth of a second. And it’s probably a mercy, because that was probably a kinder end than the unbelievably difficult situation of being four days in a cold, dark and confined space.

‘So, this would have happened very quickly. I don’t think anybody even had the time to realize what happened.

‘There are some very high forces involved, and we know something failed, and something happened to trigger it.

‘That’s why we have rules for designing and regulating – because the smallest of mistakes can have the biggest consequences.’

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