Qualla: Disappearance of ARA San Juan

Disappearance of ARA San Juan: Introduction

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Martin Otero, CC BY 2.5. Forty-four people answered a routine radio call on the morning of 15 November 2017, and then the ARA San Juan went silent. The diesel-electric submarine was running home to Mar del Plata after exercises off Tierra del Fuego, threading the cold, deep water of the San Jorge Gulf, when it reported a small emergency: seawater had leaked through the snorkel into the forward batteries and sparked a fire. The crew put it out and pressed on under their aft batteries. That was the last anyone heard. Somewhere in the hours that followed, in waters nearly a kilometer deep, the boat was lost with every soul aboard.

Image: Martin Otero | CC BY 2.5

Disappearance of ARA San Juan: The Boat and Her People

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Embajada de EEUU en la Argentina, CC BY 2.0. The San Juan was not a young vessel. Built in West Germany by Thyssen Nordseewerke, she was launched in 1983 and had served the Argentine Navy since 1985, completing a mid-life overhaul between 2008 and 2013 that replaced every battery cell. But a submarine is more than steel, an...

Image: Embajada de EEUU en la Argentina | CC BY 2.0

Disappearance of ARA San Juan: Fifteen Days of Hope

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Cámara de Diputados de la Nación Argentina, Public domain. When the silence was announced on 17 November, the world responded. More than 4,000 personnel from thirteen countries joined the hunt, scouring roughly 500,000 square kilometers of ocean, an area the size of Spain. American P-8 Poseidons dropped sonar buoys; Brazilian and British...

Image: Cámara de Diputados de la Nación Argentina | Public domain

Disappearance of ARA San Juan: The Sound the Ocean Made

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Roblespepe, CC BY-SA 4.0. The answer, it turned out, had been recorded on the first day. Listening stations run by the nuclear-test-ban organization CTBTO, on faraway Ascension Island and the Crozet Islands, had captured a single sharp event in the South Atlantic about three hours after the San Juan's las...

Image: Roblespepe | CC BY-SA 4.0

Disappearance of ARA San Juan: Found, a Year and a Day Later

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Cámara de Diputados de la Nación Argentina, Public domain. Argentina kept searching alone after the international effort wound down, eventually offering a reward of roughly five million dollars. In September 2018 the seabed-survey firm Ocean Infinity took up the hunt on a no-find, no-fee basis, with three navy officers and four crew fami...

Image: Cámara de Diputados de la Nación Argentina | Public domain

Disappearance of ARA San Juan: What the Living Carry

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Embajada de EEUU en la Argentina, CC BY 2.0. The loss of forty-four crew made this the deadliest submarine disaster since the Chinese boat 361 went down in 2003, and Argentina's worst peacetime naval tragedy since the minesweeper ARA Fournier and her crew of 77 were lost in 1949. The reckoning that followed was bitter. The ...

Image: Embajada de EEUU en la Argentina | CC BY 2.0