The leader of the expedition explained that before the start of the research trip, they raised seven major questions, which are expected to be answered. "One question was how the different parts of the ship were filled with water, ie how did the water get to the decks under the car deck. Previous research has assumed that the doors on the car deck broke due to water pressure and that water escaped to the lower decks. Now that it turns out that the doors are still healthy, the water had to flow under the car deck from somewhere else, ”Kurm justified the importance of the find. They were not able to examine all the doors in the central section of the car deck, as car wrecks block access.
Asked what the impact of the discovery would be on the expedition's further research, Kurm replied that future expert research could no longer simply assume that the doors of the central section of the car deck broke. "Calculations and simulations must now be done on the assumption that the doors are intact," he noted.
According to publicly available information, Mare Liberum's expedition is the first in which an underwater robot entered the car deck of Estonia so deep and studied it so thoroughly and filmed it. The robot moved along the car deck to a depth of about 50 meters. Underwater research this morning suffered a small setback when the robot got stuck for a few dozen minutes as its propellers got stuck in a plastic bag. "As the examination of the car deck is dangerous and the visibility is very poor, we will probably not go there any more," Kurm explained.
