> 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.
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.
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.
Hmm, they told the on scene searches within hours according to the article? It’s pretty common practice for these agencies to not comment publicly until a conclusion has been reached I feel like.
> 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>.
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.
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!
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.
When the company I work for was buying a brand new swiss grinding machine (which enables the manufacturing of some extremely precise parts), I had to fill and sign a very strange statement about:
- the exact kind of goods that we will use the machine for
- certify that we will not use it in any nuclear explosive activity, or unsafeguarded nuclear fuel-cycle activity, or the use of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons
- that we won't transfer the manufactured goods or the machine outside of specific countries without the consent of some kind of swiss economic affairs office.
It will be the centrifuges, and the extra words are to help obscure the intended target of the promise in an effort to continue the wide scale obfuscation of nuclear technology as part of the whole “born secret” international non-proliferation effort thing.
The issue with nuclear weapons isn’t the weapon it’s the enrichment. The isotopic separation via centrifugal forces is the most efficient and technically challenging method of enrichment, and the hardware required involves extremely high RPMs and requires running them non stop round the clock in banks of hundreds of connected together so that the tiny fraction of a percentage each individual centrifuge can enrich the isotopes eventually ends up adding up to a significant enough to be useful for nuclear stuff.
As you can imagine building a 50 thousand RPM centrifuge to run 24/7 is quite challenging and involves a lot of high precision parts.
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...
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.
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.
You can also track the path of the boat, to figure out which port it came from and where it went afterwards. You can also correlate it with AIS, a mandatory tracking signal for ships (used for collision avoidance etc). Of course the ship could have turned it off, but if I owned a bunch of spy satellites I would pay very special attention to any ship that appears on satellite images but doesn't have a corresponding AIS beacon.
Of course unless you are tracking a submarine back to a submarine base all of this won't tell you exactly who it was. Any state actor can just rent a fishing ship and deploy a remote controlled submarine from it. That's where more traditional information gathering comes in.
If the ship is small enough, it wouldn't be required to have an AIS beacon. From an article someone else posted, the suspected ship is a 50-foot recreational sailboat.
> A major concern in naval intelligence is the collection of up-to-date acoustic signatures for contemporary vessels so that IUSS can correctly identify them.
Doesn’t identify the occupants but could perhaps identify the vessel, depending on how extensive these databases are. Of course that’s a massive open question and I don’t want to claim it extends to small rental vessels, but I also don’t want to claim it doesn’t!
The main thing to note is that OSINT types are working with poor quality manipulable data compared to what’s available to US/NATO, even if we focus only on larger vessels with AIS. Which is not to say US/NATO should be trusted in their public statements.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Huh, I wouldn't classify any of those propulsion trains as pump-jets (and I never heard them called that aboard said vessels ;-P), but wikipedia seems to agree with you.
They're ducted propulsors, a direct evolution of the classic submarine prop that integrates a pressure-increasing shroud and stator vane assembly. A "pump jet" classically involves some sort of centrifugal pump element or at least a vectoring mechanism.
You typically wouldn't call a ducted fan (ex, on the X-22 [1]) a jet, but I guess in the water we do.
> What they're really listening for now are reactor plant noises.
Which is why old timey diesel electric submarines still sometimes have the edge over modern subs. No plant noises at all if they are running silent.
This leads to some hilarity in joint naval exercises every now and then. e.g. when HNLMS Walrus managed to "sink" among others the USS Theodore Roosevelt before getting away, to great consternation of the Americans.
It wasn't just a sunk craft. They sunk a carrier. That's painful. Your wikipedia entry is kind of weird, since it's about Australia and there are no Dutch ships in the list for the last century or so.
Australia has 'sunk' USS carriers in war games also - there are entire books written about how carriers are hard to defend in modern warfare - they're painful to lose but (shhh, don't tell anyone) relativey easy targets in all manner of ways.
The wikipedia entry is about 1400+ ships that were mostly Dutch - from the days of the Dutch East Indies and Spice trades.
It's of interest as that coast was one of the main drivers to develop "GPS 0.1" aka clocks capable of reliable determination of Longitude and one of the (relative to monetary value at the time) largest technology prizes offered.
They stopped stacking up on the West Australian coast once accurate navigation became commonplace but for a while there .. yep, Dutch ships sank themselves.
While your post is informative, it's kind of disingenuous to claim a link between two phenomena when there is none, seemingly because you needed to say something bad about Dutch ships in some way. It's a shame really, because it detracts from the quality of your other links.
> it's kind of disingenuous to claim a link between two phenomena
Which two phenomena?
Dutch ships heading to the Dutch East Indies sinking and the need to accurately measure longitude?
These are very much linked.
> needed to say something bad about Dutch ships
I felt no such need.
It's a simple fact that a comment about Netherland naval ships faux sinking US carriers prompted a remark about the large numbers of Dutch ships famously sunk off our coast here in W.Australia.
It has little to do with the quality of the ships and everything to do with the then inability to accurately reckon longitude.
Of technical interest to anyone with an interest in the evolution of surveying, navigation, timekeeping, colonial expansion, shipwrecks, treasure, etc.
> . 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.
> The bit about it being unrecognizable as an implosion because of its unique construction is complete supposition.
the theory that it would have been correctly classified by the trained system seems an even less likely complete supposition - the only arguments I've seen in favor of it are argument ad incredulity fallacies
Since you are appealing to qualifications, I am genuinely curious what your qualifications are. I have never heard of the author before but I have also never heard of you, so it would be interesting to get your technical background to compare.
Would like to hear more about this! Assuming the reaction itself is silent (?) what kinds of sounds is the reactor making and what are the challenges in quieting them?
In order to generate electricity from heat, one generally must transform the heat into mechanical energy first. This is most often done creating steam and using it to spin a turbine. I assume that this is the process that is noisy.
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
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?
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).
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.
Checking near the Titanic seems like the obvious choice. Whether or not USN microphones helped much, I of course don't know.
But my point is that it was not the case that even with USN help it took them days to find it, implying USN could not locate it in less. It's simply not information one way or the other, on its own. This data is consistent with both them instantly knowing exactly when and where, and taking days.
I'd believe it can take hours to check a small area, taking care to not drift into anything, and aiming powerful narrow spotlights. Oh, and avoiding getting currents to smack you into something of a historic landmark.
Especially since the implosion had the power of some hundreds of kg of TNT, and parts can move around in the streams too, over the past days.
There was a bit in the Lemmino video about exactly this. In it he states that there were 4 hydrophonic stations that heard "something" and follows up with the recordings for you to hear.
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.
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.
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!
It's more that they're using Skinner Box variable rate reinforcement bs to rope readers in and keep them reading, which explains why the text feels so randomized and out-of-any-logical-order.
"John Smith is buttering his toast with a spoon, much to the bemusement of our waitress Jane at the All Day Diner on the outskirts of Duluth Minnesota..."
So you dont pay for any of it and then complain this is what they have to do to get views and clicks. Chicken meet egg, egg meet chicken, pot meet kettle.
"We need to keep the revenue coming in these changing times" is not a justification for descending deeper and deeper into immoral and anti-social behavior.
Not to mention, the way market economy works means that even if we'd all start paying for shitty pseudo-journalism today, the influx of money will not make them climb back out of the ethical/quality hole - it'll only validate getting worse as a growth model.
I pay about $2k/yr for news sites and the variability is high even for paid sites. Check out the WSJ Editorial pages if you want to observe diminished writing ability.
This whole thread we’re in was started by someone observing how well-written and clear the original article is, so I don’t think the only way to get clicks is to write in the way I’m complaining about.
The fact that he publishes informative pieces at such a steady rate is remarkable as well. And the fact that he resisted to use the phrase "deep dive" in this particular one is indicative of a high level of discipline with his prose.
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
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.
Well, the clearest source is that no one claims the information was withheld, as far as I can tell that idea was just synthesized by podcasters and internet commenters. The Navy states, the WSJ reports (probably based on the Navy statement), and the Coast Guard mention that Navy intelligence reported the possible implosion almost immediately after it was discovered. The only thing that didn't happen until four days later was the release of that information to the public.
Many aspects of IUSS are still classified, and for example we can assume that the actual data will never be released because of sensitivity of the collection system. But the news that the Navy detected the implosion is nothing new, it would probably be more surprising if the Navy didn't (I don't know that the sound levels associated with a vessel of this type imploding are well known, maybe it could be explained away as the implosion having somehow produced almost no acoustic signature). We know that in the '60s the Navy detected submarine implosions (admittedly of larger submarines) further afield, and we also know that IUSS has seen major upgrades including new sensor arrays since then.
> As far as I can tell that idea was just synthesized by podcasters and internet commenters.
I don't use Twitter so can't confirm, but what I've heard in the news is that the OceanGate lawyer tweeted some vague, borderline conspiratorial stuff about not getting proper cooperation from the Coast Guard. I think the commentary people you refer to then boosted and expounded upon that idea.
The statements quoted here don't match the description "vague and borderline conspiratorial," but they could be misinterpreted that way, and maybe there were others.
>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.
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".
>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.
Releasing the information 4 days later implies it took 4 days to properly process and categorize. It probably did take some time to properly process and categorize it, because anomalous sounds happen underwater all the time, and unless it's a subsea nuclear detonation or a Russian propeller screw then it's going to go into the "figure it out later" bucket.
So what we know is it took no more then 4 days to categorize it. We don't know whether or not the system flagged it immediately, or flagged it as part of background process, or how long that took.
Joe Internet-Commentator looks at that and says "oh it was totally instant, probably".
Bill Submarine-Commander for a Hostile Power on the other hand is very interested in exactly how quick any particular detection was, to what resolution, and what implied noise-cutoffs of the network. What sort of sonic events are handled in real time vs. handled in later analysis. Because for Bill the question is "how long before I'm detected and surface ships start dropping buoys, depth charges and torpedos to kill me".
>Joe Internet-Commentator looks at that and says "oh it was totally instant, probably".
Kind of, yeah. There is a good timeline on when the ship was in water, when an event would have occurred, plus a very narrow geographical search area. That is significantly more information than is ever available when chasing ghost submarines.
It is difficult for me to imagine some bored analyst did not pop open a graph of activity within a 30 minute window of suspected loss of contact time for the area. If detectable, a ship implosion is likely a pretty aberrant signal in the data.
But why precisely does the sloppy sub operator or the mass media audience deserve the information their tax dollars are paying an analyst staff to harvest? Your idea still seems to me like potential question-begging; the fact that the habit would be of interest to people and save lives at some point is not surprising, but lifesaving is not the nature of the pointed interest of most OceanGater polemics in the first place...
I never said it had to be shared. Just that I think it incredibly likely that if a Naval sensor did detect the event, it would have been identified in short order. Potentially not definitively as an implosion, but that the Navy could have rapidly pinpointed the event in the data.
I am not qualified to state what was the appropriate timeline to give a public response nor it if should have been made.
Sure, but literally everything they're looking at is classified capability or may include classified capability. They don't have permission to just post a hot-take on Twitter, and definitely don't have permission to unilaterally release supporting data.
All of that has to run through the chain of command and declassification process.
Adding another thing of interest for Bill the Hostile Power Submarine Commander - do the Navy sonar analysts stick to protocol, or are they neglectful of their duty to the point of posting hot takes on Twitter "just because" it's a civilian matter that's trending on social media?
On that note, I wonder if they have the "loose tweets sink fleets" poster put up somewhere. Apparently, Royal Navy did this officially[0] (I may be wrong, but I thought this was an Internet meme before the official poster).
This seems most plausible. The whole thing has an air of being carefully stage managed. Lots of showing off of general capability without much detail. Lots of international cooperation noise. Etc etc. It feels like the audience was not the general public, but I'm sure a bit of general distraction from other stuff happening didn't hurt.
The author could have friends in high places, for all we know.
What could also be possible is that US has improved its sensory technology, and while its known that the US is capable of listening to the sea, they may have some new edge they want to keep obscured from the likes of russia.
I’m just some guy, but it struck me as a possible way for the US to flex on the russians, especially right now when Putin is threatening to use nukes, and the US, by the book wouldnt want to because the US may not know where all of russias nuclear subs are supposed to be. It was a great opportunity for the US military apparatus to turn on a sort of fog of war machine… for all we know intelligence may have told the likes of James Cameron and Rob Ballard to say they got early news from their navy friends.
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?
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.
I think maybe I'm underestimating the complexity of the technology. It seems like it shouldn't be that hard, I'm kinda imagining something like a weather station or a seismometer. But one thing you've helped me realize is that, at minimum, that comparison fails to account for the complexities of operating in a marine environment.
And the undersea cables operative to passive sonar? Or are they more to prevent the stations from being identified and their signals intercepted, as would be the case of if it were over radio?
> The wreck was ultimately found far away from its assigned patrol area
Maybe I'm just naive to submarine stuff, I know very little, but this doesn't seem that weird to me. If everyone died onboard from, say, a fire, the vessel might keep steaming for a long time. Presumably, the CIA has a good idea if that's the case, for all the good that does us.
I think one of the big challenges at the time was how to install the hydrophones, although as I recall there was also a novel type of hydrophone being used. AT&T had invested a lot of effort into figuring out how to not only build long cables that would survive in undersea conditions, but also deliver power on those cables to active equipment (repeaters in the case of undersea telephone cables, hydrophones in the case of SOSUS). This involved putting several-kV (I think into the tens of kV on long cables) DC onto elements of the cable, and it was hard to design a cable that was reasonable to lay but could take that potential without dielectric breakdown. Remember this was in an era where paper was still a popular insulating material on communications cables, if not lead. DC had to be used instead of AC because on these extremely long cables the capacitance between the two current-carrying elements would end up eating up most of the power you put into it.
Between Bell Labs and Western Electric, AT&T had a lot of practical expertise in designing and manufacturing some really complex cable bundles with high voltage and sensitive communications pairs nearby. This pretty much all became obsolete as soon as fiber started taking over in the '80s, but it was pretty incredible how many coaxial pairs AT&T was cramming into a buried cable (along with power for all the en route equipment!) in the '70s. Hell, AT&T famously held off on fiber for years because they had a plan to bury long microwave waveguides like cables!
I kind of wanted to say Sewell but I wasn't sure I remembered the name right and I guess I was too lazy to look it up---but that's the one. Sewell is a big advocate of this theory but I think most people, even conspiratorial ones, think of him as kind of a crank. I haven't read the book so I won't judge too harshly, I just know that the rogue nuclear mission theory sort of hinges on a lot of political currents within the Kremlin and KGB that aren't in evidence elsewhere.
Re: Scorpion, I’ve been persuaded by the argument put forth In Blind Man’s Bluff, that a faulty torpedo battery overheated and kicked off a sequence of events ultimately resulting in sinking and implosion.
When I say that these are conspiracy theories, I guess I'm saying that I don't intend to convince anyone. I mostly just provided them for entertainment value. To my knowledge only the first has ever had widespread interest, and does potentially explain some of the odd circumstances around the loss of the Scorpion and K-129, but it doesn't explain all of them. For example, one of the most materially odd things about K-129 is that it had something like a dozen crew members on board who were not part of the normal compliment, and in some unrelated event the crew manifest was lost, so we don't know who they were. That certainly fits with a general pattern of Soviet behavior, suggesting that there were intelligence officers aboard (besides the routine intelligence officer included as part of standard compliment). But that doesn't mean there was some kind of rogue KGB plot or something as some believe; it's more likely that K-129 had some kind of special but relatively routine intelligence assignment. It could support the idea that the USSR searched in the wrong area to conceal a secret assignment for K-129, perhaps close-range observation of US naval exercises. That makes some good sense in the political context as, both before and after the loss of the K-129, the Soviet Union had been extremely critical of the US and UK for performing close-range submarine surveillance of Soviet exercises---they wouldn't be keen to admit they were doing the same.
But these are all just theories. The evidence doesn't provide an especially conclusive explanation for the loss of K-129 or Scorpion, and it is doubtful that we will ever really know what happened. But there are theories to explain both losses that are more likely than KGB schemes or dramatic events of secret military history. Both may have been lost to malfunctioning torpedoes that armed and detonated in the tube or were even fired and targeted their own ships---both known hazards at the time, and in fact something that the Scorpion had survived once before. There are possible mechanical failures that could have caused either sinking. Extensive investigation of the Scorpion incident lead to design changes in later submarines to address some possible factors in the loss.
This is all good to keep in mind in the case of the Titan. Undersea losses like this happen very dramatically and the evidence is difficult to recover and analyze. We may never have anything but speculation as to the exact failure chain.
One of the reasons these theories exist is because four submarines were lost in 1968. That's a substantial portion of the total noncombat submarine losses ever. It's obviously appealing to come up with some kind of unifying theory, but as far as anyone knows it was just a coincidence.
If you want them to provide sources, just ask nicely.
They made it very clear that these explanations weren't to be taken very seriously and were mostly just interesting to think about. There's not a whole lot of value in enumerating the evidence of a conspiracy theory that isn't worth taking very seriously (in fact, I'd argue it's not very responsible to do so).
And let's just not agonize about whether HN is "becoming Reddit," it's a conversation so overwrought it's discouraged in the guidelines.
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
Without the cover-story and Howard Hughes I wonder how many researchers would have ever looked at deep sea mining.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
>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.
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.
> 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.
I didn't really get into this in the article but there's a phenomenon called SOFAR (I think this does stand for something but the acronym is sort of a joke). It's basically a specific static water pressure (and thus depth) in which sound "ducts" sort of like how HF radio can duct in the ionosphere. As I understand it, it's not at all unreasonable for a sound in the SOFAR channel to go clear around the world. I know there are cases where hydrophones have recorded a particularly loud sound multiple times because of it coming "the long way around" as well as echo effects. Some of these sounds have been things like "perhaps the loudest sound ever produced" and are attributed to seismic phenomenon, but there are a lot of strange things going on in the ocean and hydrophones continue to provide plenty of questions for marine researchers to answer. And, of course, at least some of the IUSS sensors are very intentionally placed within the SOFAR channel to capitalize on this effect.
> 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.
Yeah, that comment fascinated me too. I can only say that the character of British scarecrows is… very different from those in the US, although I can’t articulate one reason exactly why: https://www.google.com/search?&q=british+scarecrow&
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Too late to edit, but per Wikipedia[1] once the quenched-spark transmitters were widespread, transoceanic transmissions were VLF and LF, marine were MF, and amateur was high MF (above 1.5MHz).
Properly it was dampened waves. Pulses go into the antenna, but the antenna is resonant, so waves go out. A bit like hitting a tuning fork. Later on he used RLC resonant circuits for the same effect.
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.
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?:
> 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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.