BUENOS AIRES — In the year since 44 Argentine sailors vanished aboard a submarine, some relatives of the missing crew members had refused to speak of their loved ones in the past tense as they held out hope for a miracle — or at least clarity as to what befell them.
This weekend, Argentine officials said the wreckage of the submarine had been found, offering the first concrete answers about one of the deadliest and most confounding maritime disasters in modern times.
“If we had a speck of hope, now there is none left,” said Gisela Polo, the sister of Esteban Alejandro Polo, 32, one of the sailors who died. “It makes no sense to keep talking about him as if he were still alive.”
The discovery of the submarine — almost a year to the day after it disappeared — revealed that it imploded close to the ocean floor, officials said on Saturday, but that its main hull appeared to be whole.
“This is news that fills us with enormous pain,” President Mauricio Macri said in a recorded message Saturday night in which he announced three days of national mourning. “Now we’re opening a period of serious investigations to find out the whole truth.”
Ocean Infinity, a Houston-based ocean-mapping company, found the submarine nearly 270 nautical miles from shore and about 3,000 feet under water. The company used unmanned, robotic devices to find it.
Navy officials said Saturday that the relatively small area in which debris from the vessel was scattered and dents on its hull suggested an implosion caused by high pressure from the depth of the ocean.
The Norwegian-flagged Seabed Constructor vessel operated by Ocean Infinity was scheduled to leave the coast of Argentina on Thursday. Then, as a member of the team was combing through the images they had already gathered in previous sonar sweeps, he said he had found something in the data. It was the San Juan.
“The remarkable thing about it, it was literally the last thing we were going to do,” said Oliver Plunkett, chief executive of Ocean Infinity. “It is a truly unbelievable moment, in the last hour on the last day.”
Argentine officials did not immediately shed new light on what caused the disaster. They also did not say whether the submarine could be brought to shore. Officials said they would release a report next week with more technical details about the fate of the vessel and those aboard.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.