How deep do they need to go? How close do they need to be? Let's not make this more complicated than it needs to be. Since we're well into speculation mode her

How deep do they need to go? How close do they need to be? Let's not make this more complicated than it needs to be. Since we're well into speculation mode here, try this: footage of the aftermath[0] reveals an enormous 50-meter hole in the pipe, which was made of pretty thick metal. I suppose it would have to be, to carry gas under pressure from within as well as withstand being kept empty, as it was at the time of the explosion, under pressure from without. How big does an explosive have to be to cause that much damage? Pretty big, I think. Big and heavy. How close does an explosive that big have to be? Not very close, I think. Of course, there's a trade-off! The close it is, the less big it has to be and the farther it is, the smaller it can be. But a 50-meter is much bigger than it needed to be to disable the pipeline. It is almost as if the people dropping the bomb couldn't be sure how close they would get with it, so built a big enough bomb to ensure rupturing it whether it landed directly on top of it or a number of meters away. Maybe they got lucky, and expected a smaller hole. Maybe they got unlucky and expected a bigger one. I mean, the BBC footage involved zero people getting in the water. They just went to the area and dropped in a camera on a long cable and navigated to the hole. It's possible that nobody even got in the water for the bombing. They could have used a "fish finder" to make sure they were pretty close to the pipe, and even drop a test object to see how the underwater currents might shift it, but it was a pretty big bomb, I think it probably mostly went straight down. Close enough for a big bomb to make a hole in a big pipe, anyway. 0. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-63297085 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-63297085