32 ms·

Underwater ears everywhere

452 points by lonk11 3y ago

Vecr 3y ago
I really think SAR should be realistic about what's going on and quickly publish what they are trying. Otherwise you can get people who could help showing up with the wrong equipment, or not showing up at all, or people showing up who think they can help but can't and don't know it due to the lack of information.
- jcrawfordor 3y ago
  Search and rescue authorities very much do not want people just showing up with equipment based on what they heard on the news---if you are involved in search and rescue, disaster response, or related areas, one of the first things drilled into you is that you must never "self-activate." It puts an enormous workload on the people in charge of the incident if you expect them to keep the entire world informed about the state of the search, and an even bigger workload if people start showing up without having been asked. Organizations like the Coast Guard have a public information function to manage the press and cold contacts, and a logistics function to call upon resources. Volunteered resources are rarely useful if they have not been vetted and had operational procedures established in advance. My experience is only in wildfire and structure fire, but everything I've heard is that the situation is much the same in SAR and I can only imagine the issues with needing to having resources prepared in advanced are only more significant at sea where integration is very complex.
  - schoen 3y ago
    How does this interact with the norm of commercial vessels responding to distress calls at sea? I know distress calls aren't at all the same as search and rescue, but in some incidents both phases must occur.
    - fredoralive 3y ago
      There’s a bit of a difference between a ship already at sea altering it’s course to get near and assist a vessel in distress (where they might be first on he scene), vs ship going to sea especially for an event I guess? You don’t want the area too crowded with “good Samaritans” who’ve all gone to sea just to assist. I recall some comments saying that operators of a submersible that could hypothetically rescue a sub stranded on the bottom being discouraged from deploying for the Titan by the coast guard, which perhaps means they already knew the fate of the vessel. Although it could be that they already had a suitable submersible arranged already and didn’t want more in the area causing complications with coordination etc.
      - imwillofficial 3y ago
        I would say its more of a function of not trying to have to rescue two submarines. The depths at work, and the ambiguity of where the lost sub was would result in the coast guard being careful in deploying resources until more concrete info was nailed down.
    - jcrawfordor 3y ago
      Ships nearby responding to a distress call is a matter of expedience rather than good planning - something is better than nothing. But typically once an organization like a coast guard gets involved, they start giving orders to other responding ships, including sending ships away if they aren't needed and adding to the fray. This general concept is called incident command or the incident command system (ICS) after a set of practices that I think originated in firefighting but are now broadly taught by FEMA to all sorts of disaster responders. Basically that there needs to be someone in charge of the incident and there need to be standardized and controlled flows of information, otherwise it's very easy for the response to be ineffective and even dangerous because of poor communications, miscoordination, etc.
      - schoen 3y ago
        Thanks! I studied ICS as part of a neighborhood emergency response training some years ago, but I don't feel that familiar with it anymore. So I guess the basic idea is that volunteers should provide aid as they can, but once a response coordination authority is established, the volunteers should either leave the scene or put themselves under that authority's direction? (Including potentially being directed to leave the scene.)
      - brianpan 3y ago
        ICS is also how we handle software outage response (aka on-call). And yes, it originated from firefighting response. https://response.pagerduty.com/training/courses/incident_response/ https://response.pagerduty.com/training/courses/incident_res...
tls 3y ago
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darkclouds 3y ago
>Much more appealing is passive sonar, which works by listening for the sounds naturally created by underwater vehicles. Experts in marine biology. Reminds me of the night vision camera the british military were showing off on BBC Countryfile program. Who would have thought the military are experts in biology, but probably explains why the brits took off sunglasses in Iraq when talking to people, but the US didnt. You should see the british scarecrows as well! > Instead, the battle of submarine silence has mostly revolved around obscure technical problems of fluid dynamics, since one of the loudest noises made by submarines is the cavitation around the screw. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toroidal_propeller https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toroidal_propeller Difference in cavitation. https://youtu.be/k0yzBTTqfzs?t=436 https://youtu.be/k0yzBTTqfzs?t=436 Dont know if these toroidal propellers scale up to submarine sizes, they keep them hidden under an large oily rag along with the front of the subs. > did the Navy withhold information on the detection from searchers out of concern for secrecy Location of sensors maybe, after all something like the titanic will attract treasure hunters, why wouldnt interested govt's deploy remote sensors to detect who is in the area? Submarines make it easy for crew to be kept in the dark on missions as not many can use the periscope or other sensors. I read somewhere once that a sensor, sonar or hydrophone, in UK waters could detect the sounds come from a New York harbour, which gives an insight into the distance sounds can travel underwater, but considering all the noises that can be detected, having sound processing abilities, a little bit better than something like Dolby Noise Reduction, is the key part of the underwater arms race. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/may/15/listen-to-a-toadfishs-grunt-ai-helps-decode-a-symphony-of-ocean-sounds https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/may/15/listen-t... https://news.sky.com/story/titanic-sub-search-what-are-the-sonobuoys-that-picked-up-underwater-noises-12906691 https://news.sky.com/story/titanic-sub-search-what-are-the-s...
- indymike 3y ago
  > I read somewhere once that a sensor, sonar or hydrophone, in UK waters could detect the sounds come from a New York harbour, which gives an insight into the distance sounds can travel underwater, but considering all the noises that can be detected, having sound processing abilities, a little bit better than something like Dolby Noise Reduction, is the key part of the underwater arms race. In a typical attack sumbarine, a substantial amount of the ship's volume is dedicated to acoustic sensors: https://media.defenceindustrydaily.com/images/SHIP_SSN_Virginia_Block-III_Bow_Mods_lg.jpg https://media.defenceindustrydaily.com/images/SHIP_SSN_Virgi... This arms race is very old, and the state of the art even 20 years ago is pretty impressive.
manzanarama 3y ago
This writing is so clear and good. I can't tell you how many NYT articles I read where the paragraphs feel out of order, chopped up and there is no consistent flow. This reads very enjoyably.
- micromacrofoot 3y ago
  writers rarely have complete control over what editors do to their pieces before the nyt publishes them, and in this case there are no middlemen muddling things up
- SkyMarshal 3y ago
  That kind of modern journalism is absurd. Originally the rule in journalism was, the first paragraph must contain who, when, what, where, then subsequent paragraphs fill in the details in either chronological or logical order. Now the first paragraph must contain an emotional human-interest style “hook” to rope in the reader, then bury the lede in some random spot in the remainder of the text, in an attempt to keep the reader searching for it, like a slot machine. As soon as I realize that’s how something is written, I take that as signal it lacks the quality to stand alone and I discard it and move on.
  - chongli 3y ago
    Yeah. I can usually tell within the first couple of words if the article is worth reading or not. Anything that seems to start with a complete non-sequitur or some variant of “once upon a time” is an immediate back-button bounce for me!
    - simplicio 3y ago
      How can you start with a non-sequitur?
      - quickthrower2 3y ago
        Non-sequitur to the headline?
EMCymatics 3y ago
I wonder what supercavitation sounds like
- kayodelycaon 3y ago
  I looked it up and if the video is accurate, it sounds like static. About what I expected a large stream bubbles to sound like. (Imagine a shaken soda bottle can overflowing.)
saqadri 3y ago
Amazing read, convincingly explains a lot of confusion around the aftermath of the search operation. And kind of mind blowing that IUSS exists primarily to detect submarine movements around the world. I would love to learn more about the technology — are these wireless transmitters? Undersea cables all around the oceans of the world?
- jcrawfordor 3y ago
  Historically the hydrophones were attached to cables that were laid using AT&T cable-laying vessels, so technology extremely similar to the transoceanic cables of the time (thus AT&T's involvement). The change to IUSS added the ability of mobile sensors to report into this system, so there's apparently something available there (I would assume satellite). We also know that the Navy possesses buoys that trail hydrophones, and I would assume these can be integrated into IUSS as well. The modern details get to be classified though. As I understand it most of the original SOSUS arrays are still in operation, but I think they're more useful for scientific research than submarine surveillance at this point just because the newer arrays are much more sensitive. The locations of the original SOSUS arrays aren't totally public but you can put together some pretty good inferences about a lot of them, for example based on the NAVFACs that had similar cover stories and then closed at around the same time. Each one would have been the landing station and control point for a '60s array.
deleted 3y ago
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grog454 3y ago
An excellent read but one thing caught my attention: > The Navy did not withhold information on the detection for four days out of some concern for secrecy. I think it's more likely than not that the statement is correct, but what gives the author the authority to make the claim so definitively? The author's bio indicates he's a consultant and there is no indication of direct involvement in this or any other SAR effort. While the workings of the SOSUS and IUSS systems may be declassified, the deployments and capabilities (mostly range and computation related) of such systems most likely are not. And there is always the possibility that there is yet another system the author simply isn't aware of. IMO, it isn't negligence to value the secrecy of systems used for defense above some number of lives, in some situations.
- tw04 3y ago
  >While the workings of the SOSUS and IUSS systems may be declassified, the deployments and capabilities (mostly range and computation related) of such systems most likely are not. And there is always the possibility that there is yet another system the author simply isn't aware of. But they confirmed it 4 days later - which would be admitting to its capabilities. The entire talk track of: "they kept it secret because of conspiracy theory X" makes no sense when they didn't actually keep it secret, they simply didn't make it public until AFTER the team was there to search - for the fairly obvious reasons the author stated. Mainly it creates unnecessary publicity that is hurtful to the relatives of the folks that are at the bottom of the ocean, and political pressure to "not spend money on the search" which was already coming from some circles even without the Navy's information.
  - grog454 3y ago
    And those are all valid reasons to delay release. My point is that they are not mutually exclusive with declassification, or verification that the information is OK to release publicly from a security standpoint. I'm not sure why secrecy automatically means "conspiracy theory".
    - tw04 3y ago
      >I'm not sure why secrecy automatically means "conspiracy theory". It doesn't automatically, but literally everyone claiming the Navy was "hiding something" was going down the conspiracy theory route. I'm not talking about generalities, I'm talking about the specific situation in question which is the Titan sub. >the information is OK to release publicly from a security standpoint. What information are you referring to? It's already public that the navy has the system in question. It's already public that it is analyzing data realtime. Nothing about the system would have been compromised by publicly announcing they had detected an anomaly the day of the event vs 4 days later. The logical conclusion is that all of the aforementioned reasons are why they waited 4 days. You don't need clearance to get to the conclusion.
samwillis 3y ago
On this: > Instead, the battle of submarine silence has mostly revolved around obscure technical problems of fluid dynamics, since one of the loudest noises made by submarines is the cavitation around the screw. I don't know if this is true today, but at least years ago the low-noise design of the screw on modern US submarines was classified, and so the screw was covered by a sheath whenever a submarine was out of the water. I wander if they are Toroidal or "tipless" propellers? They create less turbulence and cavitation. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toroidal_propeller https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toroidal_propeller Previous posts on HN: > Toroidal propellers turn your drones and boats into noiseless machines https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34571282 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34571282 > Sharrow MX-1: Tipless propeller https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33949895 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33949895
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- jacquesm 3y ago
  https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5867831 https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5867831
- 542354234235 3y ago
  The newest US subs use shroud protected pump jet propulsor systems, which already minimize acoustic signatures. Especially when it comes to the cavitation noise from propeller tip vortices, which is what Toroidal props are fixing for "open" propeller designs. https://twitter.com/toughsf/status/1024083748407713792?lang=de https://twitter.com/toughsf/status/1024083748407713792?lang=... https://www.researchgate.net/publication/302920496_Numerical_simulation_of_tip_clearance_impact_on_a_pumpjet_propulsor https://www.researchgate.net/publication/302920496_Numerical... https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/31708/veteran-sonarman-explains-why-pump-jets-are-superior-to-props-on-modern-submarines https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/31708/veteran-sonarman... https://www.globecomposite.com/blog/x-factor-columbia-class-submarine-design https://www.globecomposite.com/blog/x-factor-columbia-class-... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2092678216302473 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S209267821...
doubledad222 3y ago
> this writing is so clear and good > Today, IUSS automatically detects and classifies both submarines and wales. Do the British know ?
- jcrawfordor 3y ago
  I am proud to say I noticed that one about two minutes before I saw your comment. It's not that I never copy edit, I just usually don't do it until two days later.
  - IggleSniggle 3y ago
    See, if you edit THEN copy, you'll get your corrections where you want them. /s
- ggambetta 3y ago
  Of course the British know. Submarine and Wales is just two tube stops from Elephant and Castle.
maxbond 3y ago
Somewhat tangentially, I've been wondering why the Soviets weren't able to locate K-129. From what I've read, they searched in a location hundreds of miles away from where SOSUS detected an implosion - why didn't the Soviets pick it up? Surely they had a hydrophone array?
- jcrawfordor 3y ago
  Well, one answer is that US hydrophone technology was probably superior at the time - but that's not necessarily a well-established fact, mostly an assumption. Still, it would stand to reason. SOSUS benefited greatly from cutting-edge research into acoustics that Bell Labs had been performing for other reasons, the Soviet Union probably didn't have the hydrophone technology or the undersea cable technology it relied on. There's a more interesting answer if you want one, although this is decidedly a conspiracy theory with, I would say, "medium" credibility within the realm of conspiracy theories. Some believe that both K-129 and Scorpion were sunk by enemy action, K-129 having been sunk by an accidental collision with the Swordfish and Scorpion having then been torpedoed in retaliation. The story goes that the admiralty of both countries, agreeing this situation could rapidly escalate into an undesirable war, agreed to suppress information on the cause of both incidents. The Soviet search for K-129 and American search for Scorpion could both have been cover operations. Yeah, it doesn't make total sense, and the evidence supporting this theory is a combination of circumstantial and recollections of people in their 80s. Besides, in the later sinking of the Kursk, Russian leadership immediately blamed a collision with a US submarine. But obviously the Russian political climate of 2000 was very different from 1968. It's a fun conspiracy theory. A more interesting conspiracy theory is that K-129 was on a rogue mission to launch nuclear weapons on the US and was torpedoed by the US (once again perhaps by Swordfish, it was in the right place at the time) to prevent this after being tipped off by by the USSR. If that sounds a bit like the plot of The Hunt for Red October, well, it does. The evidence for this story is not nonexistent but it's pretty limited, and no one takes it very seriously. Still, it gets at one of the oddities of K-129: the Soviet Union searched for it in its assigned patrol area, but the wreck was ultimately found far away from its assigned patrol area. I don't think anyone has a really good explanation for this. It was not at all typical for Soviet submarines to go off on their own, Moscow kept very tight control of them. So it seems that either Moscow didn't know where K-129 was (perhaps suggesting some kind of plot, whether of defection or rogue attack who knows), or they knew where it was and searched elsewhere to avoid showing their hand (suggesting K-129 was on some sort of very secret mission). I tend to suspect the latter is more likely, K-129 may have been ordered to leave its patrol area and approach the US as a show of force (this happened at other points in the Cold War) and when it was lost the search was conducted in the normal patrol area to avoid revealing that had happened. All indications are that SOSUS was successfully kept secret from the USSR for quite some time, although certainly not all the way until 1991. Tom Clancy seems to have based The Hunt for Red October at least in part on rumors about K-129. Yeah, I watched too many submarine movies and read too many submarine books as a kid. What can I say, I had a middle-aged father.
Emily56 3y ago
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supernova87a 3y ago
An almost mandatory entertaining article, whenever topics about cables, ocean floor, submarines come up: https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/ https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/ "Mother Earth, Mother Board" (stories about laying undersea cable and the history of wiring the Earth up" (or unpaywalled: https://archive.is/ICkHe https://archive.is/ICkHe)
- absoflutely 3y ago
  Sadly the unpaywalled version is also paywalled
  - Davy_Crockett 3y ago
    https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome
  - supernova87a 3y ago
    Oh, sorry about that. If you roll back a couple versions it's here: https://archive.is/19Msi https://archive.is/19Msi
- vGPU 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - zoltar 3y ago
    He didn't take credit for making the wire, so no.
  - dumpsterdiver 3y ago
    Jesus man, will you ever get over Trump or is this going to be your entire discourse from now on? Edit: Btw, I upvoted you, because I want your words to be seen. If you have nothing else to contribute aside from, "fuck this politician who is long out of power", then you aren't really contributing.
  - zirgs 3y ago
stall84 3y ago
I guess I'm feeling a little dumb and outlying on my immediate theory to the delay between USN officially reporting hearing the implosion, but here it is anyway: It would make sense to me that in the vast world of US Intelligence, especially when combined with signals-intelligence (like listening on what channels in Russia or China are communicating internally to each other), that when you have an event like Titan imploding, relatively close to US waters, you would want to not show those cards, and listen to hear if anyone else reports hearing anything .. Kind of like a sophisticated game of counterespionage .. That way you can get an idea of whoever else might have equipment in the water very near your own. But idk .. just the first thing that came to mind. Love this read btw
aaron695 3y ago
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stuff800 3y ago
> Instead, the battle of submarine silence has mostly revolved around obscure technical problems of fluid dynamics, since one of the loudest noises made by submarines is the cavitation around the screw. Cavitation is loud, but usually only happens if they're running full out. What they're really listening for now are reactor plant noises. > I don't know if this is true today, but at least years ago the low-noise design of the screw on modern US submarines was classified, and so the screw was covered by a sheath whenever a submarine was out of the water. Many US fast attack (Virginia, Seawolf) and the upcoming Columbia SSBN use some sort of external pump jet. I'm not sure if they cover those up out of water like they did with more 'traditional' screws.
- KennyBlanken 3y ago
  > . What they're really listening for now are reactor plant noises. Yep; a fanatical obsession with reducing plant noise is why US subs were so quiet compared to everyone else. The author knows fuck-all about what he's talking about going on about cavitation. It's also why diesel hybrid subs from Sweden are nearly undetectable. There's virtually no plant noise - probably just a coolant pump or two - while running on battery. They are sometimes 'hired' by other navies for exercises because they're so incredibly quiet. He's spouting pure bullshit about the Navy retroactively going back over their 'tapes'. He first explains that for decades the Navy has run computerized classification systems, but then we're supposed to believe that a highly sensitive listening array did not detect the extremely energetic implosion that would sound like nothing else? Cameron said that buddies in the navy told him very quickly that they'd heard the implosion, but they were confirming what he already knew when he heard that telemetry was lost at the same time as comms; telemetry came from a completely separate external pressure vessel. It going silent means it was destroyed, and the only way that could have happened was the sub imploding. The bit about it being unrecognizable as an implosion because of its unique construction is complete supposition. This is what happens when you have an article about submarines written by a guy who checks is a github engineer who likes 80's and 90's phone technology.
  - hef19898 3y ago
    Also, SOSUS being secret until 1991, as per article, and being famously and prominently featured in the book Hunt for Red October 1984...
dundarious 3y ago
Related but off topic (so I could understand being flagged, etc.), but in all likelihood, these capabilities could say a lot about what happened surrounding the Nord Stream pipeline explosions. I think it's a reasonable assumption that the US has these detectors beyond the borders of the US -- I've seen others claim as much: https://www.thenation.com/article/world/nord-stream-pipeline-explosions/ https://www.thenation.com/article/world/nord-stream-pipeline...
- 01100011 3y ago
  That area of the ocean is probably one of the most heavily surveilled areas in the world. Intelligence agencies absolutely know the ships involved. I still maintain it could have been anyone with about $300k. Work class ROVs capable of planting the explosives at that depth are commonplace in underwater construction and maintenance.
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    300k ROVs still need a mother ship and pretty sure navies and intelligence agencies know which ships go where and when.
    - 01100011 3y ago
      That's what I'm saying. That's the point of the first paragraph.
  - Dah00n 3y ago
    The German intelligence services has the ship involved and found explosive residue. As far as I remember it was linked to a Ukrainian business some time back but it could have been anyone of course. https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/germany-tells-un-nord-stream-inquiry-found-subsea-explosive-traces-yacht-2023-07-11/ https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/germany-tells-un-nord-s... Edit: I didn't read the link posted above but I see it states the same as me. Nothing to see here.
- bee_rider 3y ago
batch12 3y ago
> This website is begrudgingly generated by the use of software. Letters to the editor are welcome via facsimile What does this mean? Is it a reference I'm missing, a vague disclaimer for generated text, or am I reading too much into the footer?
- shoo 3y ago
  facsimile refers to communication by fax machine, an ancient method of written communication over telephone lines that was popular pre-email, and is still popular in remaining pre-email societies such as federal government departments and japan. > begrudgingly generated by the use of software read the top of https://computer.rip/ https://computer.rip/
  - batch12 3y ago
    I know what a fax is, but I was missing the header context. Thank you.
- jtwaleson 3y ago
  I think it just means the author does not like software too much and can be reached via fax.
AlbertCory 3y ago
A question about ELF and VLF for whoever knows: I just finished reading Thunderstruck (Erik Larson, author of Devil in the White City), which I don't recommend. It ineffectively juxtaposes the story of Marconi with Hawley Crippen, a murderer in London whose case became famous around 1910. (I say "ineffectively" because their stories really don't intersect, IMHO) The book goes on and on about all the demos and tests he ran for years and years, to the point of being eye-glazingly boring. All that aside... Anyhow: at the very end, the author tells us that Marconi discovered near the end of his life that higher frequencies obviate the need for the gigantic transmitters and receivers he'd been using. Yet he never tells us what frequencies Marconi was using! Does anyone know?
- js2 3y ago
  I loved Devil in the White City so it's too bad to hear that you didn't find Thunderstruck very good. Marconi was working on developing microwave transmission at the time of his death. Microwave antenna are small but are only good for line of sight transmission.
  - AlbertCory 3y ago
    I found I'm alarmingly ignorant of the development of radio. People had household radios in the 20s. Marconi was still alive then. From this admittedly unscientific book, he seems to have been resolutely ignorant of other people's work in the field.
- aidenn0 3y ago
  I think he was using MF and HF for most of his work, but I'm not sure[1]. The story about discovering higher frequencies remove the need for longer antennas lat in his career seems garbled since the he discovered early on that longer antennas allowed for longer distance communication. 1: His first claimed transatlantic transmissions were definitely MF.
  - AlbertCory 3y ago
    Wikipedia says he was using "pulses" instead of "continuous wave" which we now use. So maybe the question about "frequency" doesn't even apply? idk
a_bonobo 3y ago
There's an interesting link between K-129 and the current 'boom' around deep sea mining: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Azorian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Azorian The cover-story to build the Glomar Explorer to recover K-129 was that Howard Hughes thought that it was economically feasible to mine manganese nodules from the deep sea. A lot of engineering research started that year (1974) that now, 2023, bears fruit in several large companies trying to mine the ocean floor with approvals to start probably happening this year: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02290-5 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02290-5 Without the cover-story and Howard Hughes I wonder how many researchers would have ever looked at deep sea mining.
- diracs_stache 3y ago
  The Norman Polmar book on the topic is fairly interesting. Also, I've really turned into my dad reading Cold War non-fiction in bed.
tommiegannert 3y ago
Reminded me of this story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba%E2%80%93Kongsberg_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba%E2%80%93Kongsberg_scan... Toshiba wasn't allowed to export a 9-axis (C)NC-machine to the Soviet union, because it could (and would) be used to create ultra-silent submarine props, in the 80s. Asianometry video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uaRyqAVIkwI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uaRyqAVIkwI
- 542458 3y ago
  It’s kinda wild that the two executives committed fraud to export weapons technology to a major military adversary in contradiction of international agreement… and ended up with 10 and 12 month sentences. That seems really light to me!
  - romwell 3y ago
    The country that issued the sentence is the same country that profited off of the exports and whose government is heavily involved in business deals[1]... so yeah. Also, the punishment would be not to the executives, but to the company involved (Toshiba) and imposed externally. However: >In response to the affair, Toshiba carried out lobbying activities in Congress between 1987 and 1989 to ease the sanctions. The amount of money invested by Toshiba, the number of lobbyists, and the scale of its activities were said to be the largest ever. So, business as usual. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government-business_relations_in_Japan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government-business_relations_...
    - Eisenstein 3y ago
      You know, lobbying wouldn't be so bad if our government officials just ignored them when they were advocating against the public interest.
      - Exoristos 3y ago
        Found the lobbyist.
alexvoda 3y ago
I wonder if an active sonar array would be desirable. It would of course be easy to locate the beacons but they would probably be relatively cheap. Also, that much sonar noise would probably be bad for marine life. Would it give us capabilities we currently do not have?
- Tepix 3y ago
  It's not just the location of the active beacon that you're giving away. It also tells the enemy in which regions of the world's oceans you are listening.
  - alexvoda 3y ago
    If you cover the entire ocean than that is not an issue. But meanwhile I think I figured out that such an array would be a major issue because once the locations of the beacons is known, they will effectively turn every passive sonar into active sonar. Therefore it can not provide an asymmetrical informational advantage even if the investment would be asymmetrical.
    - Tepix 3y ago
      > If you cover the entire ocean than that is not an issue. Covering all oceans with active sonar will probably kill a lot of marine wildlife. Not to mention all your beacons in enemy waters will be destroyed, if not many more.
      - alexvoda 3y ago
        I was not asking about feasibility or externalities. I do not consider it a good idea. I was just asking about military usefulness. And as I said, after reflecting, I suspect even from that POV it would be detrimental.
scotty79 3y ago
And despite all those ears they let newsagencies milk the suspense about the fate of Titan submersible for days.
- andrewaylett 3y ago
  Well, that's sort of the point of the article -- they knew they'd heard something, they didn't know for sure what that noise meant, though. So they (probably, we infer from how quickly the wreckage was found) directed the rescue team to the right place to see what happened, rather than speculating. It would have been a lot worse if they'd announced that they heard noises that were consistent with an implosion but it turned out that wasn't what had happened.
daddylonglegs 3y ago
Active sonar has been back in use for searching for submarines for a few decades now, the article is out of date. Low frequency active sonar towed sonars are fitted to modern submarine hunting ships; the low frequency is necessary to get a long range as higher frequencies are heavily attenuated. If you've seen news stories about the danger to marine mammals from military sonar it was these systems that were involved, as they put large amounts of energy into the frequency bands that propagate well - these bands being the most useful for whales to communicate with as well. eg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonar_2087 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonar_2087
efitz 3y ago
> It is unwise, in the course of a search and rescue operation, to report that you think the vessel was irrecoverably lost. I made this point several times on social media during the Titan incident but it fell on deaf ears; it seemed crazy to me that people were accusing the US Navy of some nefarious cover-up regarding possible acoustic detection of implosion. Anyone who’s ever worked with any type of signal analysis would be aware of the huge uncertainty involved; the idea that we could positively identify the specific destruction of the Titan remotely was ludicrous on its face. That aside, even if the Navy was 100% certain, would you want the search for your loved ones called off because someone heard a noise? Of course not. You search for people missing at sea until you find them or until the point where any reasonable hope of finding them is gone. That applies to billionaires as well as anyone else.
- autokad 3y ago
  I'd rather the Navy be pretty sure they were dead and tell me, instead of keeping it to themselves just because they might be wrong. No one was saying don't look, people were annoyed they pretended they knew nothing when they where 99% sure the sub imploded.
  - Exoristos 3y ago
    Everyone was 99% sure. The Navy was just being discreet and staying committed to the search, which no doubt is protocol.
  - mindslight 3y ago
    > I'd rather the Navy be pretty sure they were dead and tell me Yes, because obviously you and us other media gawkers were the most important consideration here. Not you know, the families stuck essentially knowing their loved ones were dead, but still not having heard those words that finalize it. Also I don't know why they have to delay publicizing it to tell the families directly, when they could just hear it from the same news broadcast as everyone else </s>.
  - xattt 3y ago
    I thought the timing of the announcement was interesting. The implosion was not confirmed until the last few hours of the oxygen countdown media frenzy.
ct19 3y ago
There's a declassified short film about SOSUS from the 60s. It's a fun watch https://youtu.be/qsADWTHlmKI https://youtu.be/qsADWTHlmKI
bvan 3y ago
I’ve sent my comments to the author by Fax.
imwillofficial 3y ago
As a submariner, I can say this is a fantastic write up. Was a fun read and I learned a bit too.
MarkusWandel 3y ago
Ever since that MH370 plane disappeared, I've been wondering. Would it going into the water make a splash that is audibly significant (compared to other surface noise i.e. waves) and would there be hydrophones in that area of the ocean, and would enough signal processing perhaps be able to locate the splash? And has all this perhaps already been done, but the people who have, can't talk about it?
- runjake 3y ago
  Yes, acoustics was explored[1] extensively. 1. https://www.google.com/search?q=MH370%20acoustic https://www.google.com/search?q=MH370%20acoustic
- lesuorac 3y ago
  It took them many days to find the Titan despite exact knowledge of where the Titanic is. MH370 could be in a significantly wider area of the ocean so it's going to be much harder to find it. Although prices of it have already been found [1] and used to determine a crash location (35.6°S 92.8°E). [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_370#Marine_debris https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_370#M...
  - thomashabets2 3y ago
    Per the article it took them 5h to find it, after they got a vessel to the site. Not days. They seem to have gone right to it just about immediately.
    - lesuorac 3y ago
      Sticking with the article, it took them <4h to find it after the >1h to dive to the Titanic. How much credit do you want to give the USN? As far as I'm concerned, the Titan was found at a expectable rate with a blind search given its proximity to the Titanic. The Titan was found 1600ft from the Titanic so a 1600^2 area (at 100 sq/ft s; The Odysseus has a 4k camera after all) would take 7 hours so finding it within 4 hours seems entirely plausible even if you just did a blind search starting from the Titanic. But also if you knew the exact location it wouldn't take you 4 hours to find it. But my original point is really we already have estimates of MH370's location even without using secretive methods. It's just going to be a lot harder because knowing where on the surface it crashed doesn't tell you where it'll be below the surface.
rpaddock 3y ago
In World-War-One J.H. Rogers demonstrated and patented a method for communication with submarines via special antennas. Anyone have anymore information on these types of systems?: "James H. ROGERS Underground & Underwater Radio ( Static-free Reception & Transmission Underwater & Underground )" http://rexresearch.com/rogers/1rogers.htm http://rexresearch.com/rogers/1rogers.htm
escape_goat 3y ago
I think the question on everyone's mind is probably how to produce a signal from inside the hull of a single-hulled cargo vessel in the North Atlantic that will allow one to relay messages in morse code to the US Navy.
youngtaff 3y ago
> This system, called SOSUS for Sound Surveillance System, remained secret until 1991. The secrecy of SOSUS is no great surprise, as it was one of the most important military intelligence systems of the Cold War. I grew up in West Wales in the 80s, ‘everyone’ knew that the US Navy staff at RAF Brawdy were monitoring the cables that listened for submarines in the Atlantic
pugworthy 3y ago
There was a SOSUS based on the Oregon coast near where I grew up. For years it was, "That naval base" but there were rumors of cables going off shore for a long time. It would be interesting to know what the compute power was there back when, let alone what kind of people worked there.
hilbert42 3y ago
A very interesting web page but my main reason for posting is to inform everyone that it's well worth checking the archive link. There, those of a technical bent will find many more intesting artices, in fact I lost sight of time I was so engrossed in reading these articles. I've bookmarked the page and will definitely return.

452 points by lonk11 3y ago

Vecr 3y ago

I really think SAR should be realistic about what's going on and quickly publish what they are trying. Otherwise you can get people who could help showing up with the wrong equipment, or not showing up at all, or people showing up who think they can help but can't and don't know it due to the lack of information.

jcrawfordor 3y ago
Search and rescue authorities very much do not want people just showing up with equipment based on what they heard on the news---if you are involved in search and rescue, disaster response, or related areas, one of the first things drilled into you is that you must never "self-activate." It puts an enormous workload on the people in charge of the incident if you expect them to keep the entire world informed about the state of the search, and an even bigger workload if people start showing up without having been asked. Organizations like the Coast Guard have a public information function to manage the press and cold contacts, and a logistics function to call upon resources. Volunteered resources are rarely useful if they have not been vetted and had operational procedures established in advance. My experience is only in wildfire and structure fire, but everything I've heard is that the situation is much the same in SAR and I can only imagine the issues with needing to having resources prepared in advanced are only more significant at sea where integration is very complex.
- schoen 3y ago
  How does this interact with the norm of commercial vessels responding to distress calls at sea? I know distress calls aren't at all the same as search and rescue, but in some incidents both phases must occur.
  - fredoralive 3y ago
    There’s a bit of a difference between a ship already at sea altering it’s course to get near and assist a vessel in distress (where they might be first on he scene), vs ship going to sea especially for an event I guess? You don’t want the area too crowded with “good Samaritans” who’ve all gone to sea just to assist. I recall some comments saying that operators of a submersible that could hypothetically rescue a sub stranded on the bottom being discouraged from deploying for the Titan by the coast guard, which perhaps means they already knew the fate of the vessel. Although it could be that they already had a suitable submersible arranged already and didn’t want more in the area causing complications with coordination etc.
    - imwillofficial 3y ago
      I would say its more of a function of not trying to have to rescue two submarines. The depths at work, and the ambiguity of where the lost sub was would result in the coast guard being careful in deploying resources until more concrete info was nailed down.
  - jcrawfordor 3y ago
    Ships nearby responding to a distress call is a matter of expedience rather than good planning - something is better than nothing. But typically once an organization like a coast guard gets involved, they start giving orders to other responding ships, including sending ships away if they aren't needed and adding to the fray. This general concept is called incident command or the incident command system (ICS) after a set of practices that I think originated in firefighting but are now broadly taught by FEMA to all sorts of disaster responders. Basically that there needs to be someone in charge of the incident and there need to be standardized and controlled flows of information, otherwise it's very easy for the response to be ineffective and even dangerous because of poor communications, miscoordination, etc.
    - schoen 3y ago
      Thanks! I studied ICS as part of a neighborhood emergency response training some years ago, but I don't feel that familiar with it anymore. So I guess the basic idea is that volunteers should provide aid as they can, but once a response coordination authority is established, the volunteers should either leave the scene or put themselves under that authority's direction? (Including potentially being directed to leave the scene.)
    - brianpan 3y ago
      ICS is also how we handle software outage response (aka on-call). And yes, it originated from firefighting response. https://response.pagerduty.com/training/courses/incident_response/ https://response.pagerduty.com/training/courses/incident_res...

tls 3y ago

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darkclouds 3y ago

>Much more appealing is passive sonar, which works by listening for the sounds naturally created by underwater vehicles. Experts in marine biology. Reminds me of the night vision camera the british military were showing off on BBC Countryfile program. Who would have thought the military are experts in biology, but probably explains why the brits took off sunglasses in Iraq when talking to people, but the US didnt. You should see the british scarecrows as well! > Instead, the battle of submarine silence has mostly revolved around obscure technical problems of fluid dynamics, since one of the loudest noises made by submarines is the cavitation around the screw. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toroidal_propeller https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toroidal_propeller Difference in cavitation. https://youtu.be/k0yzBTTqfzs?t=436 https://youtu.be/k0yzBTTqfzs?t=436 Dont know if these toroidal propellers scale up to submarine sizes, they keep them hidden under an large oily rag along with the front of the subs. > did the Navy withhold information on the detection from searchers out of concern for secrecy Location of sensors maybe, after all something like the titanic will attract treasure hunters, why wouldnt interested govt's deploy remote sensors to detect who is in the area? Submarines make it easy for crew to be kept in the dark on missions as not many can use the periscope or other sensors. I read somewhere once that a sensor, sonar or hydrophone, in UK waters could detect the sounds come from a New York harbour, which gives an insight into the distance sounds can travel underwater, but considering all the noises that can be detected, having sound processing abilities, a little bit better than something like Dolby Noise Reduction, is the key part of the underwater arms race. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/may/15/listen-to-a-toadfishs-grunt-ai-helps-decode-a-symphony-of-ocean-sounds https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/may/15/listen-t... https://news.sky.com/story/titanic-sub-search-what-are-the-sonobuoys-that-picked-up-underwater-noises-12906691 https://news.sky.com/story/titanic-sub-search-what-are-the-s...

indymike 3y ago
> I read somewhere once that a sensor, sonar or hydrophone, in UK waters could detect the sounds come from a New York harbour, which gives an insight into the distance sounds can travel underwater, but considering all the noises that can be detected, having sound processing abilities, a little bit better than something like Dolby Noise Reduction, is the key part of the underwater arms race. In a typical attack sumbarine, a substantial amount of the ship's volume is dedicated to acoustic sensors: https://media.defenceindustrydaily.com/images/SHIP_SSN_Virginia_Block-III_Bow_Mods_lg.jpg https://media.defenceindustrydaily.com/images/SHIP_SSN_Virgi... This arms race is very old, and the state of the art even 20 years ago is pretty impressive.

manzanarama 3y ago

This writing is so clear and good. I can't tell you how many NYT articles I read where the paragraphs feel out of order, chopped up and there is no consistent flow. This reads very enjoyably.

micromacrofoot 3y ago
writers rarely have complete control over what editors do to their pieces before the nyt publishes them, and in this case there are no middlemen muddling things up
SkyMarshal 3y ago
That kind of modern journalism is absurd. Originally the rule in journalism was, the first paragraph must contain who, when, what, where, then subsequent paragraphs fill in the details in either chronological or logical order. Now the first paragraph must contain an emotional human-interest style “hook” to rope in the reader, then bury the lede in some random spot in the remainder of the text, in an attempt to keep the reader searching for it, like a slot machine. As soon as I realize that’s how something is written, I take that as signal it lacks the quality to stand alone and I discard it and move on.
- chongli 3y ago
  Yeah. I can usually tell within the first couple of words if the article is worth reading or not. Anything that seems to start with a complete non-sequitur or some variant of “once upon a time” is an immediate back-button bounce for me!
  - simplicio 3y ago
    How can you start with a non-sequitur?
    - quickthrower2 3y ago
      Non-sequitur to the headline?

EMCymatics 3y ago

I wonder what supercavitation sounds like

kayodelycaon 3y ago
I looked it up and if the video is accurate, it sounds like static. About what I expected a large stream bubbles to sound like. (Imagine a shaken soda bottle can overflowing.)

saqadri 3y ago

Amazing read, convincingly explains a lot of confusion around the aftermath of the search operation. And kind of mind blowing that IUSS exists primarily to detect submarine movements around the world. I would love to learn more about the technology — are these wireless transmitters? Undersea cables all around the oceans of the world?

jcrawfordor 3y ago
Historically the hydrophones were attached to cables that were laid using AT&T cable-laying vessels, so technology extremely similar to the transoceanic cables of the time (thus AT&T's involvement). The change to IUSS added the ability of mobile sensors to report into this system, so there's apparently something available there (I would assume satellite). We also know that the Navy possesses buoys that trail hydrophones, and I would assume these can be integrated into IUSS as well. The modern details get to be classified though. As I understand it most of the original SOSUS arrays are still in operation, but I think they're more useful for scientific research than submarine surveillance at this point just because the newer arrays are much more sensitive. The locations of the original SOSUS arrays aren't totally public but you can put together some pretty good inferences about a lot of them, for example based on the NAVFACs that had similar cover stories and then closed at around the same time. Each one would have been the landing station and control point for a '60s array.

deleted 3y ago

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grog454 3y ago

An excellent read but one thing caught my attention: > The Navy did not withhold information on the detection for four days out of some concern for secrecy. I think it's more likely than not that the statement is correct, but what gives the author the authority to make the claim so definitively? The author's bio indicates he's a consultant and there is no indication of direct involvement in this or any other SAR effort. While the workings of the SOSUS and IUSS systems may be declassified, the deployments and capabilities (mostly range and computation related) of such systems most likely are not. And there is always the possibility that there is yet another system the author simply isn't aware of. IMO, it isn't negligence to value the secrecy of systems used for defense above some number of lives, in some situations.

tw04 3y ago
>While the workings of the SOSUS and IUSS systems may be declassified, the deployments and capabilities (mostly range and computation related) of such systems most likely are not. And there is always the possibility that there is yet another system the author simply isn't aware of. But they confirmed it 4 days later - which would be admitting to its capabilities. The entire talk track of: "they kept it secret because of conspiracy theory X" makes no sense when they didn't actually keep it secret, they simply didn't make it public until AFTER the team was there to search - for the fairly obvious reasons the author stated. Mainly it creates unnecessary publicity that is hurtful to the relatives of the folks that are at the bottom of the ocean, and political pressure to "not spend money on the search" which was already coming from some circles even without the Navy's information.
- grog454 3y ago
  And those are all valid reasons to delay release. My point is that they are not mutually exclusive with declassification, or verification that the information is OK to release publicly from a security standpoint. I'm not sure why secrecy automatically means "conspiracy theory".
  - tw04 3y ago
    >I'm not sure why secrecy automatically means "conspiracy theory". It doesn't automatically, but literally everyone claiming the Navy was "hiding something" was going down the conspiracy theory route. I'm not talking about generalities, I'm talking about the specific situation in question which is the Titan sub. >the information is OK to release publicly from a security standpoint. What information are you referring to? It's already public that the navy has the system in question. It's already public that it is analyzing data realtime. Nothing about the system would have been compromised by publicly announcing they had detected an anomaly the day of the event vs 4 days later. The logical conclusion is that all of the aforementioned reasons are why they waited 4 days. You don't need clearance to get to the conclusion.

samwillis 3y ago

On this: > Instead, the battle of submarine silence has mostly revolved around obscure technical problems of fluid dynamics, since one of the loudest noises made by submarines is the cavitation around the screw. I don't know if this is true today, but at least years ago the low-noise design of the screw on modern US submarines was classified, and so the screw was covered by a sheath whenever a submarine was out of the water. I wander if they are Toroidal or "tipless" propellers? They create less turbulence and cavitation. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toroidal_propeller https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toroidal_propeller Previous posts on HN: > Toroidal propellers turn your drones and boats into noiseless machines https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34571282 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34571282 > Sharrow MX-1: Tipless propeller https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33949895 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33949895

deleted 3y ago
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jacquesm 3y ago
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5867831 https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5867831
542354234235 3y ago
The newest US subs use shroud protected pump jet propulsor systems, which already minimize acoustic signatures. Especially when it comes to the cavitation noise from propeller tip vortices, which is what Toroidal props are fixing for "open" propeller designs. https://twitter.com/toughsf/status/1024083748407713792?lang=de https://twitter.com/toughsf/status/1024083748407713792?lang=... https://www.researchgate.net/publication/302920496_Numerical_simulation_of_tip_clearance_impact_on_a_pumpjet_propulsor https://www.researchgate.net/publication/302920496_Numerical... https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/31708/veteran-sonarman-explains-why-pump-jets-are-superior-to-props-on-modern-submarines https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/31708/veteran-sonarman... https://www.globecomposite.com/blog/x-factor-columbia-class-submarine-design https://www.globecomposite.com/blog/x-factor-columbia-class-... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2092678216302473 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S209267821...

doubledad222 3y ago

> this writing is so clear and good > Today, IUSS automatically detects and classifies both submarines and wales. Do the British know ?

jcrawfordor 3y ago
I am proud to say I noticed that one about two minutes before I saw your comment. It's not that I never copy edit, I just usually don't do it until two days later.
- IggleSniggle 3y ago
  See, if you edit THEN copy, you'll get your corrections where you want them. /s
ggambetta 3y ago
Of course the British know. Submarine and Wales is just two tube stops from Elephant and Castle.

maxbond 3y ago

Somewhat tangentially, I've been wondering why the Soviets weren't able to locate K-129. From what I've read, they searched in a location hundreds of miles away from where SOSUS detected an implosion - why didn't the Soviets pick it up? Surely they had a hydrophone array?

jcrawfordor 3y ago
Well, one answer is that US hydrophone technology was probably superior at the time - but that's not necessarily a well-established fact, mostly an assumption. Still, it would stand to reason. SOSUS benefited greatly from cutting-edge research into acoustics that Bell Labs had been performing for other reasons, the Soviet Union probably didn't have the hydrophone technology or the undersea cable technology it relied on. There's a more interesting answer if you want one, although this is decidedly a conspiracy theory with, I would say, "medium" credibility within the realm of conspiracy theories. Some believe that both K-129 and Scorpion were sunk by enemy action, K-129 having been sunk by an accidental collision with the Swordfish and Scorpion having then been torpedoed in retaliation. The story goes that the admiralty of both countries, agreeing this situation could rapidly escalate into an undesirable war, agreed to suppress information on the cause of both incidents. The Soviet search for K-129 and American search for Scorpion could both have been cover operations. Yeah, it doesn't make total sense, and the evidence supporting this theory is a combination of circumstantial and recollections of people in their 80s. Besides, in the later sinking of the Kursk, Russian leadership immediately blamed a collision with a US submarine. But obviously the Russian political climate of 2000 was very different from 1968. It's a fun conspiracy theory. A more interesting conspiracy theory is that K-129 was on a rogue mission to launch nuclear weapons on the US and was torpedoed by the US (once again perhaps by Swordfish, it was in the right place at the time) to prevent this after being tipped off by by the USSR. If that sounds a bit like the plot of The Hunt for Red October, well, it does. The evidence for this story is not nonexistent but it's pretty limited, and no one takes it very seriously. Still, it gets at one of the oddities of K-129: the Soviet Union searched for it in its assigned patrol area, but the wreck was ultimately found far away from its assigned patrol area. I don't think anyone has a really good explanation for this. It was not at all typical for Soviet submarines to go off on their own, Moscow kept very tight control of them. So it seems that either Moscow didn't know where K-129 was (perhaps suggesting some kind of plot, whether of defection or rogue attack who knows), or they knew where it was and searched elsewhere to avoid showing their hand (suggesting K-129 was on some sort of very secret mission). I tend to suspect the latter is more likely, K-129 may have been ordered to leave its patrol area and approach the US as a show of force (this happened at other points in the Cold War) and when it was lost the search was conducted in the normal patrol area to avoid revealing that had happened. All indications are that SOSUS was successfully kept secret from the USSR for quite some time, although certainly not all the way until 1991. Tom Clancy seems to have based The Hunt for Red October at least in part on rumors about K-129. Yeah, I watched too many submarine movies and read too many submarine books as a kid. What can I say, I had a middle-aged father.

Emily56 3y ago

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supernova87a 3y ago

An almost mandatory entertaining article, whenever topics about cables, ocean floor, submarines come up: https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/ https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/ "Mother Earth, Mother Board" (stories about laying undersea cable and the history of wiring the Earth up" (or unpaywalled: https://archive.is/ICkHe https://archive.is/ICkHe)

absoflutely 3y ago
Sadly the unpaywalled version is also paywalled
- Davy_Crockett 3y ago
  https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome
- supernova87a 3y ago
  Oh, sorry about that. If you roll back a couple versions it's here: https://archive.is/19Msi https://archive.is/19Msi
vGPU 3y ago
[flagged]
- zoltar 3y ago
  He didn't take credit for making the wire, so no.
- dumpsterdiver 3y ago
  Jesus man, will you ever get over Trump or is this going to be your entire discourse from now on? Edit: Btw, I upvoted you, because I want your words to be seen. If you have nothing else to contribute aside from, "fuck this politician who is long out of power", then you aren't really contributing.
- zirgs 3y ago

stall84 3y ago

I guess I'm feeling a little dumb and outlying on my immediate theory to the delay between USN officially reporting hearing the implosion, but here it is anyway: It would make sense to me that in the vast world of US Intelligence, especially when combined with signals-intelligence (like listening on what channels in Russia or China are communicating internally to each other), that when you have an event like Titan imploding, relatively close to US waters, you would want to not show those cards, and listen to hear if anyone else reports hearing anything .. Kind of like a sophisticated game of counterespionage .. That way you can get an idea of whoever else might have equipment in the water very near your own. But idk .. just the first thing that came to mind. Love this read btw

aaron695 3y ago

[dead]

stuff800 3y ago

> Instead, the battle of submarine silence has mostly revolved around obscure technical problems of fluid dynamics, since one of the loudest noises made by submarines is the cavitation around the screw. Cavitation is loud, but usually only happens if they're running full out. What they're really listening for now are reactor plant noises. > I don't know if this is true today, but at least years ago the low-noise design of the screw on modern US submarines was classified, and so the screw was covered by a sheath whenever a submarine was out of the water. Many US fast attack (Virginia, Seawolf) and the upcoming Columbia SSBN use some sort of external pump jet. I'm not sure if they cover those up out of water like they did with more 'traditional' screws.

KennyBlanken 3y ago
> . What they're really listening for now are reactor plant noises. Yep; a fanatical obsession with reducing plant noise is why US subs were so quiet compared to everyone else. The author knows fuck-all about what he's talking about going on about cavitation. It's also why diesel hybrid subs from Sweden are nearly undetectable. There's virtually no plant noise - probably just a coolant pump or two - while running on battery. They are sometimes 'hired' by other navies for exercises because they're so incredibly quiet. He's spouting pure bullshit about the Navy retroactively going back over their 'tapes'. He first explains that for decades the Navy has run computerized classification systems, but then we're supposed to believe that a highly sensitive listening array did not detect the extremely energetic implosion that would sound like nothing else? Cameron said that buddies in the navy told him very quickly that they'd heard the implosion, but they were confirming what he already knew when he heard that telemetry was lost at the same time as comms; telemetry came from a completely separate external pressure vessel. It going silent means it was destroyed, and the only way that could have happened was the sub imploding. The bit about it being unrecognizable as an implosion because of its unique construction is complete supposition. This is what happens when you have an article about submarines written by a guy who checks is a github engineer who likes 80's and 90's phone technology.
- hef19898 3y ago
  Also, SOSUS being secret until 1991, as per article, and being famously and prominently featured in the book Hunt for Red October 1984...

dundarious 3y ago

Related but off topic (so I could understand being flagged, etc.), but in all likelihood, these capabilities could say a lot about what happened surrounding the Nord Stream pipeline explosions. I think it's a reasonable assumption that the US has these detectors beyond the borders of the US -- I've seen others claim as much: https://www.thenation.com/article/world/nord-stream-pipeline-explosions/ https://www.thenation.com/article/world/nord-stream-pipeline...

01100011 3y ago
That area of the ocean is probably one of the most heavily surveilled areas in the world. Intelligence agencies absolutely know the ships involved. I still maintain it could have been anyone with about $300k. Work class ROVs capable of planting the explosives at that depth are commonplace in underwater construction and maintenance.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  300k ROVs still need a mother ship and pretty sure navies and intelligence agencies know which ships go where and when.
  - 01100011 3y ago
    That's what I'm saying. That's the point of the first paragraph.
- Dah00n 3y ago
  The German intelligence services has the ship involved and found explosive residue. As far as I remember it was linked to a Ukrainian business some time back but it could have been anyone of course. https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/germany-tells-un-nord-stream-inquiry-found-subsea-explosive-traces-yacht-2023-07-11/ https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/germany-tells-un-nord-s... Edit: I didn't read the link posted above but I see it states the same as me. Nothing to see here.
bee_rider 3y ago

batch12 3y ago

> This website is begrudgingly generated by the use of software. Letters to the editor are welcome via facsimile What does this mean? Is it a reference I'm missing, a vague disclaimer for generated text, or am I reading too much into the footer?

shoo 3y ago
facsimile refers to communication by fax machine, an ancient method of written communication over telephone lines that was popular pre-email, and is still popular in remaining pre-email societies such as federal government departments and japan. > begrudgingly generated by the use of software read the top of https://computer.rip/ https://computer.rip/
- batch12 3y ago
  I know what a fax is, but I was missing the header context. Thank you.
jtwaleson 3y ago
I think it just means the author does not like software too much and can be reached via fax.

AlbertCory 3y ago

A question about ELF and VLF for whoever knows: I just finished reading Thunderstruck (Erik Larson, author of Devil in the White City), which I don't recommend. It ineffectively juxtaposes the story of Marconi with Hawley Crippen, a murderer in London whose case became famous around 1910. (I say "ineffectively" because their stories really don't intersect, IMHO) The book goes on and on about all the demos and tests he ran for years and years, to the point of being eye-glazingly boring. All that aside... Anyhow: at the very end, the author tells us that Marconi discovered near the end of his life that higher frequencies obviate the need for the gigantic transmitters and receivers he'd been using. Yet he never tells us what frequencies Marconi was using! Does anyone know?

js2 3y ago
I loved Devil in the White City so it's too bad to hear that you didn't find Thunderstruck very good. Marconi was working on developing microwave transmission at the time of his death. Microwave antenna are small but are only good for line of sight transmission.
- AlbertCory 3y ago
  I found I'm alarmingly ignorant of the development of radio. People had household radios in the 20s. Marconi was still alive then. From this admittedly unscientific book, he seems to have been resolutely ignorant of other people's work in the field.
aidenn0 3y ago
I think he was using MF and HF for most of his work, but I'm not sure[1]. The story about discovering higher frequencies remove the need for longer antennas lat in his career seems garbled since the he discovered early on that longer antennas allowed for longer distance communication. 1: His first claimed transatlantic transmissions were definitely MF.
- AlbertCory 3y ago
  Wikipedia says he was using "pulses" instead of "continuous wave" which we now use. So maybe the question about "frequency" doesn't even apply? idk

a_bonobo 3y ago

There's an interesting link between K-129 and the current 'boom' around deep sea mining: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Azorian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Azorian The cover-story to build the Glomar Explorer to recover K-129 was that Howard Hughes thought that it was economically feasible to mine manganese nodules from the deep sea. A lot of engineering research started that year (1974) that now, 2023, bears fruit in several large companies trying to mine the ocean floor with approvals to start probably happening this year: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02290-5 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02290-5 Without the cover-story and Howard Hughes I wonder how many researchers would have ever looked at deep sea mining.

diracs_stache 3y ago
The Norman Polmar book on the topic is fairly interesting. Also, I've really turned into my dad reading Cold War non-fiction in bed.

tommiegannert 3y ago

Reminded me of this story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba%E2%80%93Kongsberg_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba%E2%80%93Kongsberg_scan... Toshiba wasn't allowed to export a 9-axis (C)NC-machine to the Soviet union, because it could (and would) be used to create ultra-silent submarine props, in the 80s. Asianometry video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uaRyqAVIkwI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uaRyqAVIkwI

542458 3y ago
It’s kinda wild that the two executives committed fraud to export weapons technology to a major military adversary in contradiction of international agreement… and ended up with 10 and 12 month sentences. That seems really light to me!
- romwell 3y ago
  The country that issued the sentence is the same country that profited off of the exports and whose government is heavily involved in business deals[1]... so yeah. Also, the punishment would be not to the executives, but to the company involved (Toshiba) and imposed externally. However: >In response to the affair, Toshiba carried out lobbying activities in Congress between 1987 and 1989 to ease the sanctions. The amount of money invested by Toshiba, the number of lobbyists, and the scale of its activities were said to be the largest ever. So, business as usual. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government-business_relations_in_Japan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government-business_relations_...
  - Eisenstein 3y ago
    You know, lobbying wouldn't be so bad if our government officials just ignored them when they were advocating against the public interest.
    - Exoristos 3y ago
      Found the lobbyist.

alexvoda 3y ago

I wonder if an active sonar array would be desirable. It would of course be easy to locate the beacons but they would probably be relatively cheap. Also, that much sonar noise would probably be bad for marine life. Would it give us capabilities we currently do not have?

Tepix 3y ago
It's not just the location of the active beacon that you're giving away. It also tells the enemy in which regions of the world's oceans you are listening.
- alexvoda 3y ago
  If you cover the entire ocean than that is not an issue. But meanwhile I think I figured out that such an array would be a major issue because once the locations of the beacons is known, they will effectively turn every passive sonar into active sonar. Therefore it can not provide an asymmetrical informational advantage even if the investment would be asymmetrical.
  - Tepix 3y ago
    > If you cover the entire ocean than that is not an issue. Covering all oceans with active sonar will probably kill a lot of marine wildlife. Not to mention all your beacons in enemy waters will be destroyed, if not many more.
    - alexvoda 3y ago
      I was not asking about feasibility or externalities. I do not consider it a good idea. I was just asking about military usefulness. And as I said, after reflecting, I suspect even from that POV it would be detrimental.

scotty79 3y ago

And despite all those ears they let newsagencies milk the suspense about the fate of Titan submersible for days.

andrewaylett 3y ago
Well, that's sort of the point of the article -- they knew they'd heard something, they didn't know for sure what that noise meant, though. So they (probably, we infer from how quickly the wreckage was found) directed the rescue team to the right place to see what happened, rather than speculating. It would have been a lot worse if they'd announced that they heard noises that were consistent with an implosion but it turned out that wasn't what had happened.

daddylonglegs 3y ago

Active sonar has been back in use for searching for submarines for a few decades now, the article is out of date. Low frequency active sonar towed sonars are fitted to modern submarine hunting ships; the low frequency is necessary to get a long range as higher frequencies are heavily attenuated. If you've seen news stories about the danger to marine mammals from military sonar it was these systems that were involved, as they put large amounts of energy into the frequency bands that propagate well - these bands being the most useful for whales to communicate with as well. eg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonar_2087 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonar_2087

efitz 3y ago

> It is unwise, in the course of a search and rescue operation, to report that you think the vessel was irrecoverably lost. I made this point several times on social media during the Titan incident but it fell on deaf ears; it seemed crazy to me that people were accusing the US Navy of some nefarious cover-up regarding possible acoustic detection of implosion. Anyone who’s ever worked with any type of signal analysis would be aware of the huge uncertainty involved; the idea that we could positively identify the specific destruction of the Titan remotely was ludicrous on its face. That aside, even if the Navy was 100% certain, would you want the search for your loved ones called off because someone heard a noise? Of course not. You search for people missing at sea until you find them or until the point where any reasonable hope of finding them is gone. That applies to billionaires as well as anyone else.

autokad 3y ago
I'd rather the Navy be pretty sure they were dead and tell me, instead of keeping it to themselves just because they might be wrong. No one was saying don't look, people were annoyed they pretended they knew nothing when they where 99% sure the sub imploded.
- Exoristos 3y ago
  Everyone was 99% sure. The Navy was just being discreet and staying committed to the search, which no doubt is protocol.
- mindslight 3y ago
  > I'd rather the Navy be pretty sure they were dead and tell me Yes, because obviously you and us other media gawkers were the most important consideration here. Not you know, the families stuck essentially knowing their loved ones were dead, but still not having heard those words that finalize it. Also I don't know why they have to delay publicizing it to tell the families directly, when they could just hear it from the same news broadcast as everyone else </s>.
- xattt 3y ago
  I thought the timing of the announcement was interesting. The implosion was not confirmed until the last few hours of the oxygen countdown media frenzy.

ct19 3y ago

There's a declassified short film about SOSUS from the 60s. It's a fun watch https://youtu.be/qsADWTHlmKI https://youtu.be/qsADWTHlmKI

bvan 3y ago

I’ve sent my comments to the author by Fax.

imwillofficial 3y ago

As a submariner, I can say this is a fantastic write up. Was a fun read and I learned a bit too.

MarkusWandel 3y ago

Ever since that MH370 plane disappeared, I've been wondering. Would it going into the water make a splash that is audibly significant (compared to other surface noise i.e. waves) and would there be hydrophones in that area of the ocean, and would enough signal processing perhaps be able to locate the splash? And has all this perhaps already been done, but the people who have, can't talk about it?

runjake 3y ago
Yes, acoustics was explored[1] extensively. 1. https://www.google.com/search?q=MH370%20acoustic https://www.google.com/search?q=MH370%20acoustic
lesuorac 3y ago
It took them many days to find the Titan despite exact knowledge of where the Titanic is. MH370 could be in a significantly wider area of the ocean so it's going to be much harder to find it. Although prices of it have already been found [1] and used to determine a crash location (35.6°S 92.8°E). [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_370#Marine_debris https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_370#M...
- thomashabets2 3y ago
  Per the article it took them 5h to find it, after they got a vessel to the site. Not days. They seem to have gone right to it just about immediately.
  - lesuorac 3y ago
    Sticking with the article, it took them <4h to find it after the >1h to dive to the Titanic. How much credit do you want to give the USN? As far as I'm concerned, the Titan was found at a expectable rate with a blind search given its proximity to the Titanic. The Titan was found 1600ft from the Titanic so a 1600^2 area (at 100 sq/ft s; The Odysseus has a 4k camera after all) would take 7 hours so finding it within 4 hours seems entirely plausible even if you just did a blind search starting from the Titanic. But also if you knew the exact location it wouldn't take you 4 hours to find it. But my original point is really we already have estimates of MH370's location even without using secretive methods. It's just going to be a lot harder because knowing where on the surface it crashed doesn't tell you where it'll be below the surface.

rpaddock 3y ago

In World-War-One J.H. Rogers demonstrated and patented a method for communication with submarines via special antennas. Anyone have anymore information on these types of systems?: "James H. ROGERS Underground & Underwater Radio ( Static-free Reception & Transmission Underwater & Underground )" http://rexresearch.com/rogers/1rogers.htm http://rexresearch.com/rogers/1rogers.htm

escape_goat 3y ago

I think the question on everyone's mind is probably how to produce a signal from inside the hull of a single-hulled cargo vessel in the North Atlantic that will allow one to relay messages in morse code to the US Navy.

youngtaff 3y ago

> This system, called SOSUS for Sound Surveillance System, remained secret until 1991. The secrecy of SOSUS is no great surprise, as it was one of the most important military intelligence systems of the Cold War. I grew up in West Wales in the 80s, ‘everyone’ knew that the US Navy staff at RAF Brawdy were monitoring the cables that listened for submarines in the Atlantic

pugworthy 3y ago

There was a SOSUS based on the Oregon coast near where I grew up. For years it was, "That naval base" but there were rumors of cables going off shore for a long time. It would be interesting to know what the compute power was there back when, let alone what kind of people worked there.

hilbert42 3y ago

A very interesting web page but my main reason for posting is to inform everyone that it's well worth checking the archive link. There, those of a technical bent will find many more intesting artices, in fact I lost sight of time I was so engrossed in reading these articles. I've bookmarked the page and will definitely return.