A submarine has been missing for three days. According to CNN, an Argentine navy submarine with a crew of 44 has been missing for several days after the Navy lost contact, off the country’s Atlantic coast.
The ARA San Juan was last seen on Wednesday in the San Jorge Gulf, a few hundred miles off the coast of southern Argentina.
Search crews are looking for the vessel by air and sea, according to a Navy spokesman. The submarine has been traveling from a base in far southern Argentina’s Tierra del Fuego archipelago to its home base in Mar del Plata, a few hundred kilometers northeast. The vessel was supposed to arrive at its destination on Sunday. That said, officials hope the crew will bring the submarine to the surface.
“The submarine knows that if it does not have communication with land for this long, it has to surface,” navy spokesman Enrique Balbi told reporters.
News of the missing submarine hit close to home for the Vatican. Pope Francis, who is from Argentina and former archbishop of Buenos Aires, offered his “fervent prayers for the 44 officers aboard the ARA San Juan” in a statement released on Saturday by Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s secretary of state.
According to CNN, the navy said it ordered “all terrestrial communication stations along the Argentine coast to carry out a preliminary and extended search of communications and to listen into all the possible frequencies of the submarine.”
The United States Navy is also said to be helping. They plan on deploying a maritime aircraft to Argentina on Saturday.