A top secret United States Navy acoustic detection system picked up a sound “anomaly” in the North Atlantic that was likely the fatal imploion of the Titan submersible that was lost with five people on board while on an expedition to the wreck of the Titanic.

According to a senior military official, the Navy went back and analysed acoustic data after the Titan submersible was reported missing on Sunday and found an anomaly “consistent with an implosion or explosion in the general vicinity of where the Titan submersible was operating when communications were lost”.

The Navy passed the information on to the US Coast Guard, which continued its serch for the Titan because the Navy did not consider the data to be definitive, the senior Navy official told the Associated Press news agency on Thursday.

The Wall Street Journal was the first to report the Navy’s involvement and the detection of the acoustics from the deep sea, the  latest piece in the jigsaw regarding the fate of the Titan and its five occupants following the discovery of debris on Thursday that was consistent with the missing vessel operated by OceanGate Expeditions.

Remotely operated underwater vehicle (ROV) found five major fragments of the 6.7-metre (22-foot) Titan submarine in a debris field on the seabed some 488 metres (1,600ft) from the bow of the wreck of the Titanic, which rests 4km (around 2.5 miles) beneath the surface of the ocean, in a remote corner of the North Atlantic, US Coast Guard Rear Admiral John Mauger told reporters.

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

The fragments found included the Titan’s tail cone and two sections of the pressure hull. No mention has been made of whether human remains were sighted.

The five onboard the Titan were OceanGate’s founder and chief executive officer Stockton Rush, who was piloting the vessel; a United Kingdom billionaire businessman and explorer Hamish Harding, 58; Pakistani-born businessman Shahzada Dawood, 48, and his 19-year-old son, Suleman, both UK citizens; and French oceanographer and renowned Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet, 77, who had visited the wreck dozens of times.

Al Jazeera’s Gabriel Elizondo, reporting from Boston in the US, said the US Navy was now collecting debris in order to analyse what remained of the Titan as part of a wider investigation into how the accident occurred.

According to Elizondo, the US Navy confirmed on Thursday evening that “a top-secret acoustic detection system” had picked up sounds “similar to what would have been an implosion on Sunday near where the Titan went missing”.

(Aljazeera)