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.
Based on your recommendation, I just read the first chapter, a harrowing account of how the first sub-based spy mission against Murmansk went catastrophically wrong.
During a rescue operation in the Arctic ocean, several submariners were tossed into the sea. Some of them were killed by their experimental life preservers, until then untested under real world conditions.
The life preservers were floating devices sewn into foul weather gear and boots. The boots were attached to the rest of the suit and could only be removed using a special tool. When hitting the frigid water, a number of the floating devices sewn into jackets burst, leaving the boots as the only buoyant part of the suit.
While the men's boots pulled their feet upwards, the weight of the rest of the suit pulled them under water. Quickly tiring in the churning sear, several drowned, feet pointing upwards.
Lesson still not learned: Equipment untested in the intended domain of application has not been tested.
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.
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.
> 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.
This counts as a maritime accident so the NTSB will likely be investigating. They'd want the Coast Guard to locate and try to recover any pieces it could for the investigation anyway.
Besides, the vast majority of that money is already spent. The variable cost is actually quite low - largely just overtime and fuel cost. Often the fuel comes out of reserves that have to be rotated out anyway.
The cynical part of me thinks everyone involved knew what had happened on Sunday. There was ample evidence that the submersible imploded (repeated stress on a carbon fiber frame, zero regard for safety, the fact that all communication was lost permanently). Then there was the fact that the logistics involved in a rescue were basically insurmountable. The Navy/Coast Guard saw this as a good live training exercise and the media got a great story. No one was gonna ruin things by admitting that the whole thing was hopeless and not really worth pursuing.
I imagine one reason is to check their assumptions. If the Coast Guard had found something, the Navy would have learned their analysis was off. Also, the Navy saying "we have secret evidence they are dead, so we are calling off the search" is terrible PR.
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.
> to look for a target it knew was probably destroyed
If I am ever in a situation like this or under a fallen building or whatever I hope the rescue team will continue until death is 100% sure like starving or what and not because of some events happened.
If it's only "probably destroyed" then it's perfectly reasonable to hold off on an announcement and to keep looking for a few days.
You wouldn't want to tell the families that their relatives are dead and then go home without making sure you did what you could.
This assumes that the watchstanders who heard the banging were experienced enough to have a sense that it was implosion. Just as likely, some junior guy maybe heard it and waited to see if anyone else would say something because "they probably heard it too and they all know better than me."
My first thought was it was the perfect cover to increase increase patrols on looking for Russian subs. There’s almost certainly 1 or more out there, and with this disaster, it gave them the cover they needed to prevent the media from breaking out into a ‘USA looking for Russian subs, this is war” and being the population into more hysteria.
My other thought was that if they showed up alive then it almost definitely was was a cover but I suppose I was on wrong on that front. Still think the story gave them the opportunity to drop a lot more sonar buoys and increase patrols and ‘look’ for something.
Remember we now KNOW for sure that the sub imploded, given the debris field, which means a sound loud enough to be picked up was generated. The Navy staying schtum on this does no one any good. It's also possible that someone in the political leadership overrode the preferences of people concerned about intelligence, but in this case I suspect that it's just pointless to deny it, so why not leak it now when it's going to be swamped by the news cycle.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
It's usually illegal for the person to tell the reporter, but legal for the reporter to repeat what he was told. Notice that the Navy asked (not told) the reporter to withhold certain details.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0N17tEW_WEU&t=166s This is what a controlled vacuum implosion of a liquid tank looks like at 1 atmosphere of pressure, including cameras showing the inside of the tank.
The depth of the Titanic wreck is 3800m; down there the vessel would be subjected to 380 times that pressure. So...probably.
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.
Watch how quickly those glass objects imploded as much lower pressures than they would have been at, it would have happened faster than their brains could have comprehended it, so there's some mercy in that at least.
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.
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?
Even with the USN knowing it was fruitless, the USCG can use the activity to look at its operations and determine what improvements for SAR might exist in a way that pre-planned training exercises can not.
_zzaw|2 years ago
hrunt|2 years ago
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/...
davidktr|2 years ago
During a rescue operation in the Arctic ocean, several submariners were tossed into the sea. Some of them were killed by their experimental life preservers, until then untested under real world conditions.
The life preservers were floating devices sewn into foul weather gear and boots. The boots were attached to the rest of the suit and could only be removed using a special tool. When hitting the frigid water, a number of the floating devices sewn into jackets burst, leaving the boots as the only buoyant part of the suit.
While the men's boots pulled their feet upwards, the weight of the rest of the suit pulled them under water. Quickly tiring in the churning sear, several drowned, feet pointing upwards.
Lesson still not learned: Equipment untested in the intended domain of application has not been tested.
nukeman|2 years ago
jacknews|2 years ago
unknown|2 years ago
[deleted]
aaron695|2 years ago
[deleted]
yborg|2 years ago
stochtastic|2 years ago
> “While not definitive, this information was immediately shared with the Incident Commander to assist with the ongoing search and rescue mission.”
So:
* They knew about it and quickly aided in the search.
* They did not broadcast the details of the collection to the public.
That seems like the right call to me.
civilitty|2 years ago
This counts as a maritime accident so the NTSB will likely be investigating. They'd want the Coast Guard to locate and try to recover any pieces it could for the investigation anyway.
Besides, the vast majority of that money is already spent. The variable cost is actually quite low - largely just overtime and fuel cost. Often the fuel comes out of reserves that have to be rotated out anyway.
xienze|2 years ago
HWR_14|2 years ago
kneebonian|2 years ago
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.
tedunangst|2 years ago
nazka|2 years ago
If I am ever in a situation like this or under a fallen building or whatever I hope the rescue team will continue until death is 100% sure like starving or what and not because of some events happened.
Ratiofarmings|2 years ago
happytoexplain|2 years ago
tbihl|2 years ago
Accujack|2 years ago
Obviously, an Orca rave.
phpisthebest|2 years ago
hmmm
soultrees|2 years ago
My other thought was that if they showed up alive then it almost definitely was was a cover but I suppose I was on wrong on that front. Still think the story gave them the opportunity to drop a lot more sonar buoys and increase patrols and ‘look’ for something.
EA-3167|2 years ago
chrononaut|2 years ago
> 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|2 years ago
kevin_nisbet|2 years ago
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|2 years ago
> 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-fligh...
cushychicken|2 years ago
The recordings related to it haven't been released, nor has an official explanation.
kneebonian|2 years ago
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|2 years ago
psychphysic|2 years ago
I guess we were both wrong.
trog|2 years ago
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.
edgineer|2 years ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vela_incident
throwawaylinux|2 years ago
> I guess we were both wrong.
Optimistic.
jhanschoo|2 years ago
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|2 years ago
chakintosh|2 years ago
Don't they have different sound signatures and so they're able to determine whether it's the former or the latter?
listenallyall|2 years ago
pasmafaute|2 years ago
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.
HWR_14|2 years ago
m_0x|2 years ago
MrFoof|2 years ago
Absolutely occurred in under 30ms (upper bound). Possibly as quick as 2ms, and in all likelihood well under 10ms.
somerandomqaguy|2 years ago
The depth of the Titanic wreck is 3800m; down there the vessel would be subjected to 380 times that pressure. So...probably.
chakintosh|2 years ago
Mythbusters did an episode showing what happens to a human body under deep sea implosion
> https://youtu.be/LEY3fN4N3D8
It's ugly.
kneebonian|2 years ago
Sylamore|2 years ago
Watch how quickly those glass objects imploded as much lower pressures than they would have been at, it would have happened faster than their brains could have comprehended it, so there's some mercy in that at least.
winrid|2 years ago
calyth2018|2 years ago
RoyGBivCap|2 years ago
Vecr|2 years ago
Blahah|2 years ago
unknown|2 years ago
[deleted]
CHB0403085482|2 years ago
ikekkdcjkfke|2 years ago
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?
rajnathani|2 years ago
LatteLazy|2 years ago
When it is "leaked" I assume they heard nothing and don't want to disclose the (in)accuracy of their kit.
chmod775|2 years ago
EdwardDiego|2 years ago
Read up on underwater acoustic propagation to see why. Lots of interacting variables that can reflect, scatter, focus, alter affect absorption etc.
JennaDawn20|2 years ago
HeyLaughingBoy|2 years ago
ChatGTP|2 years ago
black_13|2 years ago
[deleted]
vaidhy|2 years ago
cjensen|2 years ago
dessimus|2 years ago
dontupvoteme|2 years ago
kneebonian|2 years ago