14 ms·

Top secret U.S. Navy system heard titan implosion days ago

186 points by whytai 3y ago

_zzaw 3y ago
https://archive.is/pSpem https://archive.is/pSpem
psychphysic 3y ago
Well heck I just argued with a bunch of people, who said the USN knew but would never tell anyone and me saying it's a baseless claim. I guess we were both wrong.
- edgineer 3y ago
  Well, we've had US intelligence, and specifically SOSUS, make its way to the public before, like with [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vela_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vela_incident
  - cushychicken 3y ago
    They used SOSUS to detect what happened to the USS Scorpion when it disappeared. Wasn't disclosed until many, many years later. SOSUS was highly classified until very recently.
    - garbagecoder 3y ago
      SOSUS may have been classified but you could read about it 40+ years ago.
      - cushychicken 3y ago
        But not it's true purpose: tracking Soviet submarines.
        twoodfin 3y ago
        It wasn’t quite 40 years ago, but there’s a line in the film The Hunt for Red October (1990) that explicitly describes SOSUS as a submarine “warning net”. Knowing Tom Clancy, I’d guess there are similar references in the book (1984). If it was meant to be a secret it wasn’t well-kept.
        garbagecoder 3y ago
        Script written in 1982. People thought he had access to classified info, but he didn't.[1] He was just using what we now call OSINT. There is a lot more about SOSUS in Red Storm Rising which was only a few years later. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/1986/08/12/books/author-of-red-october-stirs-up-a-red-storm.html https://www.nytimes.com/1986/08/12/books/author-of-red-octob...
        garbagecoder 3y ago
        Yes, people knew it's true purpose then. They were wrong about how it was laid out, but people knew about it. It was declassified 30 years ago or so. And much of it was not top secret, just secret. We use entirely different computers and networks for "just" secret vs. unclassified vs. "top" secret. The exact way they do it now, where they do it, etc. is the secret. The mere existence of a sensitive listening system is not a secret that endangers national security if known; the opposite is true, we want people to know/think they can't move a tennis ball underwater without us hearing it. Knowing enough about it to get past it is such a secret.
  - 8bitsrule 3y ago
    Or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOSUS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOSUS (article created 2003)
- throwawaylinux 3y ago
  Ouch, things were getting heated. > I guess we were both wrong. Optimistic.
- trog 3y ago
  The USN might also say they knew, without actually knowing, just to exaggerate the claims of their capabilities. I take everything any country says about stuff like this with massive grains of salt - if they're not providing the information in real-time and then it later turns out to be true then coming back later and saying "oh we knew that all along" is kinda hard to take seriously.
  - psychphysic 3y ago
    That's a good point actually. Similarly they claim the implosion was detected and triangulated but the banging went undetected until sonar buoys were deployed.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
m_0x 3y ago
Does this mean the passengers had an instantaneous death?
- kneebonian 3y ago
  Theres an avid discussion on the other thread about this, but the short answer is likely yes. They were probably crushed, incinerated and then bludgeoned to death in less than 3ms, and probably unconscious before they were aware of any of the rest of it.
  - losvedir 3y ago
    While the physical trauma would have been instantaneous, they might have known it was going to happen. James Cameron just said in an interview[0] that they had a sensor system inside which detects when the hull is starting to fail, and that they probably had warning because they had dropped their weights to ascend. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rThZLhNF_xg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rThZLhNF_xg
    - vanattab 3y ago
      How do we know the weights where dropped before the immplosion
      - chiph 3y ago
        Once they locate the wreckage, if the weights aren't nearby that's a strong sign they were detached before the implosion. They would have fallen to a different location on the seafloor than the hull because they're denser and have a smaller cross-section, thus not affected as much by the hydrodynamics during the fall.
        lamontcg 3y ago
        I thought the drop weights were held on by electromagnets--essentially a dead-man switch kind of fail-safe. So therefore when the power failed due to the implosion the weights would drop.
yborg 3y ago
I'm pretty sure the Navy also knows what was causing the "banging" heard underwater during the search. I don't understand the point of leaking this information now, it just makes it look like the Coast Guard spent 3 days and considerable money pretending to look for a target it knew was probably destroyed.
- kneebonian 3y ago
  For starters the USCG != USN. They are 2 completely seperate branches of the military, even if the Navy likes to pretend the USCG doesn't exist and the USCG likes to pretend it's just as important as the Navy. With that being the case it could be operational inertia. Sonar tech hears something weird, reports it to his boss. His boss puts in a morning update the next day, he sees about the sub on the news, but he can't just go sending this info off, he runs it up the chain, eventually a person with authority hands it off to the USCG who then passes it back down, and eventually someone in media gets ahold of it, or someone in an official capacity makes an announcement.
  - bnt 3y ago
    Would be easier if they had shared Slack channels
    - andrewstuart2 3y ago
      Best I can do is a flat file message transfer that runs weekly (with 18% success rate) between branch mainframes.
      - anyoneamous 3y ago
        So, Teams?
        zo1 3y ago
        As opposed to JSON push-notification payloads over webhooks run by a SASS GovCallbacks.io and costing 15$ a month for?
Vecr 3y ago
Where did the comment about SOSUS go? That's the passive hydrophone system used 50 years ago.
- Blahah 3y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36440114 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36440114
kneebonian 3y ago
For those who doubted this... one of the main components of a strategic nuclear arm is submarines, even more than ICBMs to an extant, a nuclear strike might be able to wipe out all your launch facilities, but it isn't going to take out your subs, which are going to be around for a 2nd strike. Because of that being able to detect anything in the ocean anywhere within a reasonable distance of your coastal regions is a matter of life and death for a strong nuclear power, so the USN definitly new about this. Heck the USN probably knows the location of every single whale in 50% of the Earth's oceans.
- dekhn 3y ago
  One might say that subs are the only truly strategic component of nuclear arms.
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    > subs are the only truly strategic component of nuclear arms I used to think this. But land-based missiles are essential for MAD, as a nuclear sponge and by being cheap. They also protect against a technological horizon over which subs are unmasked. (There is a great scene in The Expanse which contemplates such a horizon.) What I can’t get my head around are nuclear bombers, which largely seem to be for posturing [1]. [1] https://www.airuniversity.af.edu/Portals/10/SSQ/documents/Volume-11_Issue-4/Watson.pdf https://www.airuniversity.af.edu/Portals/10/SSQ/documents/Vo...
    - dragonwriter 3y ago
      > What I can’t get my head around are nuclear bombers, which largely seem to be for posturing Posturing is super important, strategically, though. Also, nuclear-capable bombers double as conventional bombers, so there’s that.
    - le-mark 3y ago
      > They also protect against a technological horizon over which subs are unmasked. I’ve read speculation that Russia boomers are followed at all times by at least one fast attack, and they can listen for sounds like missile bay doors opening. I have no sources, but given the state of Russia navy it seems plausible.
vaidhy 3y ago
So, we spent all the time and money confirming what USN already knew?
- kneebonian 3y ago
  USN != USCG. See my other comment in this thread that can explain it well.
  - garbagecoder 3y ago
    That doesn't matter, dude. This is all set up on an ICS model. They're highly coordinated. Turn on your news sometime and one guy, a fire chief, a sheriff, or maybe rarely a military guy will be speaking and it won't be because they rock-paper-scissored for it. I'm the last person to deny the massive frustrating bureaucracy that is the US military, but in this kind of thing, that's not an issue. Former O-4 17 alpha. I was even less connected to the Coast Guard than the Navy is, but since they do port security, including cyber, if there was an issue there they were involved.
    - HWR_14 3y ago
      Wouldn't it be possible, if the Navy program were too secret, that they had no counterpart in the Coast Guard cleared for it?
      - garbagecoder 3y ago
        Of course it's possible, but this isn't one of those things. Certain aspects of the systems are breathtakingly reported as "top secret" in the press, but the existence of sonar systems good at hearing and sifting noise to recognize that kind of sound is widely known. We know Coca Cola exists. Hell we know the ingredients, but we don't know the recipe. One of the first things I imagine an incident commander would do would be to ask if anyone has anything like that. Any ships in the area, military or civilian or foreign hear/see anything that they know of. Sounds like he got that information soon. Does that mean the whole thing was a waste of time? Without knowing more about exactly what they did or didn't do, I can't say. And whether they should have done all of this is besides the point. They decided to do a search. And until they could connect that sound with the vessel, they needed to keep looking. This is why stupid people doing stupid shit isn't just a Darwin Award situation. Search and rescue types don't want to stop until they succeed and you're putting them at risk too. They leave bodies on Everest, I would hope this was only ever just to confirm they were dead and no one was going down there but who knows.
kevin_nisbet 3y ago
While I'm sure the details are top secret, I think the existence of the monitoring has be known for quite some time. As I recall, a submarine disappeared much further away than the titanic wreck, much closer to Spain, and the recordings were eventually used to prove it was a collision of submarines or something like that. And rule out that the submarine was attacked by a torpedo. So I haven't been following this story all that closely, but I would've been somewhat more surprised had there been an implosion or similar it wasn't sitting on a recording somewhere. How quick it is to extract, triangulate, etc are another story.
- BrianHenryIE 3y ago
  There was an Argentinian one, 2017. > The information about the possible explosion was received on Thursday from the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty Organization, or CTBTO, an international body that runs a global network of listening posts designed to check for secret atomic blasts. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-argentina-submarine-flight-idUSKBN1DN19V https://www.reuters.com/article/us-argentina-submarine-fligh...
- cushychicken 3y ago
  You're referring to the wreck of the USS Scorpion. The fact that SOSUS was used to detect its crush event wasn't disclosed until many, many years later. The recordings related to it haven't been released, nor has an official explanation.
hrunt 3y ago
Those who are familiar with US submarine operations would assume this from the start. For an excellent account of the development of US submarine capabilities (including listening and detection), I wholeheartedly recommend the book "Blind Man's Bluff".[0] How that book hasn't been made into a mini-series is beyond me. The stories and characters are incredible. [0] https://www.amazon.com/Blind-Mans-Bluff-Submarine-Espionage/dp/006103004X https://www.amazon.com/Blind-Mans-Bluff-Submarine-Espionage/...
- jacknews 3y ago
  Right, I don't think it took a top-secret listening system either - those subs can hear snow falling in NY from half way across the atlantic.
- nukeman 3y ago
  I work at a Department of Energy facility as a contractor. Our DOE facility rep was a Navy Nuke, and gave me a copy of this book. I agree that it is fantastic. And it’s written in a gripping narrative style, so it reads more like a novel and less like conventional non-fiction.
  - dingaling 3y ago
    The novelesque style of writing was a real turn-off for me and I returned the book. The authors attempted to dramatise every event as if they were there on the bridge at the time, even for events 60 years previous. I've been trying to find a less breathless, more academic treatment of the subject but haven't had any success.
    - tough 3y ago
      Ask an LLM to rewrite it?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- aaron695 3y ago
chrononaut 3y ago
This article is written in a strange way. > The Navy began listening for the Titan almost as soon as the sub lost communications, according to a U.S. defense official. "Began listening" -- So OceanGate actually contacted the Coast Guard immediately? > Shortly after its disappearance, the U.S. system detected what it suspected was the sound of an implosion near the debris site discovered Thursday and reported its findings to the commander on site, U.S. defense officials said. The commander on site? Like the Coast Guard commander on site? That would imply the implosion happened many hours after the loss of communication. > “The U.S. Navy conducted an analysis of acoustic data and detected an anomaly consistent with an implosion or explosion in the general vicinity of where the Titan submersible was operating when communications were lost,” a senior U.S. Navy official told The Wall Street Journal in a statement. “While not definitive, this information was immediately shared with the Incident Commander to assist with the ongoing search and rescue mission.” This makes it more like they retroactively looked at the data and noted that the implosion happened and then informed the commander.
- bagels 3y ago
  Began listening: maybe someone started listening to the recordings, or started analyzing them at that point. It's hard to believe their systems aren't just constantly recording and triangulating sounds to give a radar-like view of any subs they find out there.
listenallyall 3y ago
Maybe this is off-topic, but in the midst of so much controversy about "top-secret documents" -- is it actually legal to leak out that such a "top secret military acoustic detection system" even exists, and if so, the results of the system's use? I mean, how is it "top secret" if it's in the newspaper?
- pasmafaute 3y ago
  It's very common for "technical details" of a system to receive a different classification than the "fact of existence" of said system. In other words, it's widely known that the Navy has a system for listening. The internal designation, capabilities and limits of operation are not widely known and that information should be kept secret. > The Navy asked that the specific system used not be named, citing national security concerns.
  - listenallyall 3y ago
    So the name, and internal designation, is "top secret"? You're saying the capabilities are also secret but the newspaper just reported the data it generated, which certainly suggests what its capabilities are. And why is it "widely known" that the military has this listening system? If it's really "top secret" then no, the public shouldn't know about it. Seems like everything is "top secret" until someone wants to show off all the cool toys.
    - rich_sasha 3y ago
      I think existence of automatic surveillance isn't a secret. The secret bits would include what this can detect, but I guess the presumption here is that an imploding civilian sub is easier to hear than a Russian military sub. So not really giving anything away.
      - listenallyall 3y ago
        That's ridiculous though, either it is "top secret" or it isn't. There shouldn't be some arbitrary sliding scale of what's ok to reveal and what's not.
JennaDawn20 3y ago
Does anyone know if they had any “deep-sea” or “submersible” cameras recording the expedition and can recover those cameras/footage to help in knowing what happened?
- HeyLaughingBoy 3y ago
  Implosion's too fast to be captured unless you're using a dedicated high-speed camera.
ChatGTP 3y ago
Is it a top secret system now?
CHB0403085482 3y ago
How deep is it? https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-06-23/titanic-submersible-deep-sea-scroller/102504810 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-06-23/titanic-submersible-d...
ikekkdcjkfke 3y ago
Calculation and modeling only takes you so far. As materials engineers you should strive to intimately know the materials you are working with. It's in our DNA to gauge and get a feel for materials, like a cat balancing on a thin branch, or a dog finding good spots to crunch a bone. How does a carbon fibre tube behave when slightly overloaded with external pressure?
LatteLazy 3y ago
If there was no mention of it, I would assume they heard it and did not way to disclose the accuracy of their kit. When it is "leaked" I assume they heard nothing and don't want to disclose the (in)accuracy of their kit.
jhanschoo 3y ago
> The Navy began listening for the Titan almost as soon as the sub lost communications, according to a U.S. defense official. Shortly after its disappearance, the U.S. system detected what it suspected was the sound of an implosion near the debris site discovered Thursday and reported its findings to the commander on site, U.S. defense officials said. I think the journalist may have assumed the wrong sequence of events. This makes it look as though the Navy wasn't recording until after the sub lost comms. That would mean that the implosion actually occurred some time after loss of contact. >> The U.S. Navy conducted an analysis of acoustic data and detected an anomaly consistent with an implosion or explosion in the general vicinity of where the Titan submersible was operating when communications were lost, If this is the statement issued (that the journalist then "dumbed down" wrongly), then after comms was lost they started analyzing recorded data that was being recorded circa when contact was lost, which would make more sense.
- WastingMyTime89 3y ago
  The Navy is listening at all time but sounds travel weirdly in sea water due to temperature and salinity gradients and submarines tend to travel through zones where their own sound isn't carried very well. They might have been ordered to move to a point where they would have been more likely to hear the Titan.
  - mozman 3y ago
    Ocean acidity also impacts acoustic transmission, one of the leading causes of noise pollution for fish.
- chakintosh 3y ago
  > an implosion or explosion Don't they have different sound signatures and so they're able to determine whether it's the former or the latter?
chmod775 3y ago
If someone with a background in such things could explain how far such a sound could realistically travel in water before becoming indistinguishable from background noise, I'd be grateful.
- EdwardDiego 3y ago
  "It really depends" is as good as you're likely going to get. Read up on underwater acoustic propagation to see why. Lots of interacting variables that can reflect, scatter, focus, alter affect absorption etc.
black_13 3y ago
[dead]
rajnathani 3y ago
Predicted in a HN comment on the first post about the missing incident here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36393019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36393019

186 points by whytai 3y ago

https://archive.is/pSpem https://archive.is/pSpem

Well heck I just argued with a bunch of people, who said the USN knew but would never tell anyone and me saying it's a baseless claim. I guess we were both wrong.

edgineer 3y ago
Well, we've had US intelligence, and specifically SOSUS, make its way to the public before, like with [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vela_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vela_incident
- cushychicken 3y ago
  They used SOSUS to detect what happened to the USS Scorpion when it disappeared. Wasn't disclosed until many, many years later. SOSUS was highly classified until very recently.
  - garbagecoder 3y ago
    SOSUS may have been classified but you could read about it 40+ years ago.
    - cushychicken 3y ago
      But not it's true purpose: tracking Soviet submarines.
      - twoodfin 3y ago
        It wasn’t quite 40 years ago, but there’s a line in the film The Hunt for Red October (1990) that explicitly describes SOSUS as a submarine “warning net”. Knowing Tom Clancy, I’d guess there are similar references in the book (1984). If it was meant to be a secret it wasn’t well-kept.
        garbagecoder 3y ago
        Script written in 1982. People thought he had access to classified info, but he didn't.[1] He was just using what we now call OSINT. There is a lot more about SOSUS in Red Storm Rising which was only a few years later. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/1986/08/12/books/author-of-red-october-stirs-up-a-red-storm.html https://www.nytimes.com/1986/08/12/books/author-of-red-octob...
      - garbagecoder 3y ago
        Yes, people knew it's true purpose then. They were wrong about how it was laid out, but people knew about it. It was declassified 30 years ago or so. And much of it was not top secret, just secret. We use entirely different computers and networks for "just" secret vs. unclassified vs. "top" secret. The exact way they do it now, where they do it, etc. is the secret. The mere existence of a sensitive listening system is not a secret that endangers national security if known; the opposite is true, we want people to know/think they can't move a tennis ball underwater without us hearing it. Knowing enough about it to get past it is such a secret.
- 8bitsrule 3y ago
  Or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOSUS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOSUS (article created 2003)
throwawaylinux 3y ago
Ouch, things were getting heated. > I guess we were both wrong. Optimistic.
trog 3y ago
The USN might also say they knew, without actually knowing, just to exaggerate the claims of their capabilities. I take everything any country says about stuff like this with massive grains of salt - if they're not providing the information in real-time and then it later turns out to be true then coming back later and saying "oh we knew that all along" is kinda hard to take seriously.
- psychphysic 3y ago
  That's a good point actually. Similarly they claim the implosion was detected and triangulated but the banging went undetected until sonar buoys were deployed.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

m_0x 3y ago

Does this mean the passengers had an instantaneous death?

kneebonian 3y ago
Theres an avid discussion on the other thread about this, but the short answer is likely yes. They were probably crushed, incinerated and then bludgeoned to death in less than 3ms, and probably unconscious before they were aware of any of the rest of it.
- losvedir 3y ago
  While the physical trauma would have been instantaneous, they might have known it was going to happen. James Cameron just said in an interview[0] that they had a sensor system inside which detects when the hull is starting to fail, and that they probably had warning because they had dropped their weights to ascend. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rThZLhNF_xg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rThZLhNF_xg
  - vanattab 3y ago
    How do we know the weights where dropped before the immplosion
    - chiph 3y ago
      Once they locate the wreckage, if the weights aren't nearby that's a strong sign they were detached before the implosion. They would have fallen to a different location on the seafloor than the hull because they're denser and have a smaller cross-section, thus not affected as much by the hydrodynamics during the fall.
      - lamontcg 3y ago
        I thought the drop weights were held on by electromagnets--essentially a dead-man switch kind of fail-safe. So therefore when the power failed due to the implosion the weights would drop.

yborg 3y ago

I'm pretty sure the Navy also knows what was causing the "banging" heard underwater during the search. I don't understand the point of leaking this information now, it just makes it look like the Coast Guard spent 3 days and considerable money pretending to look for a target it knew was probably destroyed.

kneebonian 3y ago
For starters the USCG != USN. They are 2 completely seperate branches of the military, even if the Navy likes to pretend the USCG doesn't exist and the USCG likes to pretend it's just as important as the Navy. With that being the case it could be operational inertia. Sonar tech hears something weird, reports it to his boss. His boss puts in a morning update the next day, he sees about the sub on the news, but he can't just go sending this info off, he runs it up the chain, eventually a person with authority hands it off to the USCG who then passes it back down, and eventually someone in media gets ahold of it, or someone in an official capacity makes an announcement.
- bnt 3y ago
  Would be easier if they had shared Slack channels
  - andrewstuart2 3y ago
    Best I can do is a flat file message transfer that runs weekly (with 18% success rate) between branch mainframes.
    - anyoneamous 3y ago
      So, Teams?
      - zo1 3y ago
        As opposed to JSON push-notification payloads over webhooks run by a SASS GovCallbacks.io and costing 15$ a month for?

Vecr 3y ago

Where did the comment about SOSUS go? That's the passive hydrophone system used 50 years ago.

Blahah 3y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36440114 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36440114

kneebonian 3y ago

For those who doubted this... one of the main components of a strategic nuclear arm is submarines, even more than ICBMs to an extant, a nuclear strike might be able to wipe out all your launch facilities, but it isn't going to take out your subs, which are going to be around for a 2nd strike. Because of that being able to detect anything in the ocean anywhere within a reasonable distance of your coastal regions is a matter of life and death for a strong nuclear power, so the USN definitly new about this. Heck the USN probably knows the location of every single whale in 50% of the Earth's oceans.

dekhn 3y ago
One might say that subs are the only truly strategic component of nuclear arms.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > subs are the only truly strategic component of nuclear arms I used to think this. But land-based missiles are essential for MAD, as a nuclear sponge and by being cheap. They also protect against a technological horizon over which subs are unmasked. (There is a great scene in The Expanse which contemplates such a horizon.) What I can’t get my head around are nuclear bombers, which largely seem to be for posturing [1]. [1] https://www.airuniversity.af.edu/Portals/10/SSQ/documents/Volume-11_Issue-4/Watson.pdf https://www.airuniversity.af.edu/Portals/10/SSQ/documents/Vo...
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    > What I can’t get my head around are nuclear bombers, which largely seem to be for posturing Posturing is super important, strategically, though. Also, nuclear-capable bombers double as conventional bombers, so there’s that.
  - le-mark 3y ago
    > They also protect against a technological horizon over which subs are unmasked. I’ve read speculation that Russia boomers are followed at all times by at least one fast attack, and they can listen for sounds like missile bay doors opening. I have no sources, but given the state of Russia navy it seems plausible.

vaidhy 3y ago

So, we spent all the time and money confirming what USN already knew?

kneebonian 3y ago
USN != USCG. See my other comment in this thread that can explain it well.
- garbagecoder 3y ago
  That doesn't matter, dude. This is all set up on an ICS model. They're highly coordinated. Turn on your news sometime and one guy, a fire chief, a sheriff, or maybe rarely a military guy will be speaking and it won't be because they rock-paper-scissored for it. I'm the last person to deny the massive frustrating bureaucracy that is the US military, but in this kind of thing, that's not an issue. Former O-4 17 alpha. I was even less connected to the Coast Guard than the Navy is, but since they do port security, including cyber, if there was an issue there they were involved.
  - HWR_14 3y ago
    Wouldn't it be possible, if the Navy program were too secret, that they had no counterpart in the Coast Guard cleared for it?
    - garbagecoder 3y ago
      Of course it's possible, but this isn't one of those things. Certain aspects of the systems are breathtakingly reported as "top secret" in the press, but the existence of sonar systems good at hearing and sifting noise to recognize that kind of sound is widely known. We know Coca Cola exists. Hell we know the ingredients, but we don't know the recipe. One of the first things I imagine an incident commander would do would be to ask if anyone has anything like that. Any ships in the area, military or civilian or foreign hear/see anything that they know of. Sounds like he got that information soon. Does that mean the whole thing was a waste of time? Without knowing more about exactly what they did or didn't do, I can't say. And whether they should have done all of this is besides the point. They decided to do a search. And until they could connect that sound with the vessel, they needed to keep looking. This is why stupid people doing stupid shit isn't just a Darwin Award situation. Search and rescue types don't want to stop until they succeed and you're putting them at risk too. They leave bodies on Everest, I would hope this was only ever just to confirm they were dead and no one was going down there but who knows.

kevin_nisbet 3y ago

While I'm sure the details are top secret, I think the existence of the monitoring has be known for quite some time. As I recall, a submarine disappeared much further away than the titanic wreck, much closer to Spain, and the recordings were eventually used to prove it was a collision of submarines or something like that. And rule out that the submarine was attacked by a torpedo. So I haven't been following this story all that closely, but I would've been somewhat more surprised had there been an implosion or similar it wasn't sitting on a recording somewhere. How quick it is to extract, triangulate, etc are another story.

BrianHenryIE 3y ago
There was an Argentinian one, 2017. > The information about the possible explosion was received on Thursday from the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty Organization, or CTBTO, an international body that runs a global network of listening posts designed to check for secret atomic blasts. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-argentina-submarine-flight-idUSKBN1DN19V https://www.reuters.com/article/us-argentina-submarine-fligh...
cushychicken 3y ago
You're referring to the wreck of the USS Scorpion. The fact that SOSUS was used to detect its crush event wasn't disclosed until many, many years later. The recordings related to it haven't been released, nor has an official explanation.

hrunt 3y ago

Those who are familiar with US submarine operations would assume this from the start. For an excellent account of the development of US submarine capabilities (including listening and detection), I wholeheartedly recommend the book "Blind Man's Bluff".[0] How that book hasn't been made into a mini-series is beyond me. The stories and characters are incredible. [0] https://www.amazon.com/Blind-Mans-Bluff-Submarine-Espionage/dp/006103004X https://www.amazon.com/Blind-Mans-Bluff-Submarine-Espionage/...

jacknews 3y ago
Right, I don't think it took a top-secret listening system either - those subs can hear snow falling in NY from half way across the atlantic.
nukeman 3y ago
I work at a Department of Energy facility as a contractor. Our DOE facility rep was a Navy Nuke, and gave me a copy of this book. I agree that it is fantastic. And it’s written in a gripping narrative style, so it reads more like a novel and less like conventional non-fiction.
- dingaling 3y ago
  The novelesque style of writing was a real turn-off for me and I returned the book. The authors attempted to dramatise every event as if they were there on the bridge at the time, even for events 60 years previous. I've been trying to find a less breathless, more academic treatment of the subject but haven't had any success.
  - tough 3y ago
    Ask an LLM to rewrite it?
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
aaron695 3y ago

chrononaut 3y ago

This article is written in a strange way. > The Navy began listening for the Titan almost as soon as the sub lost communications, according to a U.S. defense official. "Began listening" -- So OceanGate actually contacted the Coast Guard immediately? > Shortly after its disappearance, the U.S. system detected what it suspected was the sound of an implosion near the debris site discovered Thursday and reported its findings to the commander on site, U.S. defense officials said. The commander on site? Like the Coast Guard commander on site? That would imply the implosion happened many hours after the loss of communication. > “The U.S. Navy conducted an analysis of acoustic data and detected an anomaly consistent with an implosion or explosion in the general vicinity of where the Titan submersible was operating when communications were lost,” a senior U.S. Navy official told The Wall Street Journal in a statement. “While not definitive, this information was immediately shared with the Incident Commander to assist with the ongoing search and rescue mission.” This makes it more like they retroactively looked at the data and noted that the implosion happened and then informed the commander.

bagels 3y ago
Began listening: maybe someone started listening to the recordings, or started analyzing them at that point. It's hard to believe their systems aren't just constantly recording and triangulating sounds to give a radar-like view of any subs they find out there.

listenallyall 3y ago

Maybe this is off-topic, but in the midst of so much controversy about "top-secret documents" -- is it actually legal to leak out that such a "top secret military acoustic detection system" even exists, and if so, the results of the system's use? I mean, how is it "top secret" if it's in the newspaper?

pasmafaute 3y ago
It's very common for "technical details" of a system to receive a different classification than the "fact of existence" of said system. In other words, it's widely known that the Navy has a system for listening. The internal designation, capabilities and limits of operation are not widely known and that information should be kept secret. > The Navy asked that the specific system used not be named, citing national security concerns.
- listenallyall 3y ago
  So the name, and internal designation, is "top secret"? You're saying the capabilities are also secret but the newspaper just reported the data it generated, which certainly suggests what its capabilities are. And why is it "widely known" that the military has this listening system? If it's really "top secret" then no, the public shouldn't know about it. Seems like everything is "top secret" until someone wants to show off all the cool toys.
  - rich_sasha 3y ago
    I think existence of automatic surveillance isn't a secret. The secret bits would include what this can detect, but I guess the presumption here is that an imploding civilian sub is easier to hear than a Russian military sub. So not really giving anything away.
    - listenallyall 3y ago
      That's ridiculous though, either it is "top secret" or it isn't. There shouldn't be some arbitrary sliding scale of what's ok to reveal and what's not.

JennaDawn20 3y ago

Does anyone know if they had any “deep-sea” or “submersible” cameras recording the expedition and can recover those cameras/footage to help in knowing what happened?

HeyLaughingBoy 3y ago
Implosion's too fast to be captured unless you're using a dedicated high-speed camera.

ChatGTP 3y ago

Is it a top secret system now?

CHB0403085482 3y ago

How deep is it? https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-06-23/titanic-submersible-deep-sea-scroller/102504810 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-06-23/titanic-submersible-d...

ikekkdcjkfke 3y ago

Calculation and modeling only takes you so far. As materials engineers you should strive to intimately know the materials you are working with. It's in our DNA to gauge and get a feel for materials, like a cat balancing on a thin branch, or a dog finding good spots to crunch a bone. How does a carbon fibre tube behave when slightly overloaded with external pressure?

LatteLazy 3y ago

If there was no mention of it, I would assume they heard it and did not way to disclose the accuracy of their kit. When it is "leaked" I assume they heard nothing and don't want to disclose the (in)accuracy of their kit.

jhanschoo 3y ago

> The Navy began listening for the Titan almost as soon as the sub lost communications, according to a U.S. defense official. Shortly after its disappearance, the U.S. system detected what it suspected was the sound of an implosion near the debris site discovered Thursday and reported its findings to the commander on site, U.S. defense officials said. I think the journalist may have assumed the wrong sequence of events. This makes it look as though the Navy wasn't recording until after the sub lost comms. That would mean that the implosion actually occurred some time after loss of contact. >> The U.S. Navy conducted an analysis of acoustic data and detected an anomaly consistent with an implosion or explosion in the general vicinity of where the Titan submersible was operating when communications were lost, If this is the statement issued (that the journalist then "dumbed down" wrongly), then after comms was lost they started analyzing recorded data that was being recorded circa when contact was lost, which would make more sense.

WastingMyTime89 3y ago
The Navy is listening at all time but sounds travel weirdly in sea water due to temperature and salinity gradients and submarines tend to travel through zones where their own sound isn't carried very well. They might have been ordered to move to a point where they would have been more likely to hear the Titan.
- mozman 3y ago
  Ocean acidity also impacts acoustic transmission, one of the leading causes of noise pollution for fish.
chakintosh 3y ago
> an implosion or explosion Don't they have different sound signatures and so they're able to determine whether it's the former or the latter?

chmod775 3y ago

If someone with a background in such things could explain how far such a sound could realistically travel in water before becoming indistinguishable from background noise, I'd be grateful.

EdwardDiego 3y ago
"It really depends" is as good as you're likely going to get. Read up on underwater acoustic propagation to see why. Lots of interacting variables that can reflect, scatter, focus, alter affect absorption etc.

black_13 3y ago

[dead]

rajnathani 3y ago

Predicted in a HN comment on the first post about the missing incident here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36393019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36393019