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.
The novelesque style of writing was a real turn-off for me and I returned the book. The authors attempted to dramatise every event as if they were there on the bridge at the time, even for events 60 years previous.
I've been trying to find a less breathless, more academic treatment of the subject but haven't had any success.
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.
I assume these people could've been doing something more useful than recovering debris, so there's also the value of lost opportunities to be taken into account.
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.
Even if you can guess they're gone, you're still going to try to mount a rescue in the case that you were wrong.
And nobody with any shred of PR training would make a "heard a big boom, they're probably fucked" statement with all the world's media and the families listening. Nobody wants to tell the families that its over until they've got hard proof.
Add to that the fact that it didn't surface by releasing the ballasts. It lost communications before it reached the wreckage. The pilot needed that communication to find the wreckage.
Maybe they would have continued to make the attempt. But unless it got snagged, the ballasts were designed to break off after 24 hours and rise to the surface.
Even a hopeless situation, people still want to see, and possibly recover, the surviving wreckage. The whole point of the original exploration was to view the Titanic wreckage. Various military spent enormous resources looking for MH370 for months/years.
Don't quite know what was so great about this story. It was a textbook example of the catastrophic consequences of hubris meeting ignorance, and that was about it. The rest was just milking the drama as timed passed by with decreasing theoretical oxygen reserves.
I think they mean from the perspective of the heartless suits at news companies and/or their parent conglomerates, this was a 'great' story. Lots of eyes. People checking back in for updates. ie. Lots of clicks and clickthroughs
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.
What is communication like between different branches of the US military nowadays?
I remember reading a series of newspapers articles about the Somalia battle that was later the subject of the "Black Hawk Down" movie. I haven't seen the movie so don't know if it covered the communication issue I'm about to mention.
The army had a convoy on the ground trying to reach the crashed Black Hawk helicopter. The navy had a surveillance plane watching. The plane would see that the convoy was heading toward and ambush but they could not talk directly to the convoy (I don't remember if it was because they didn't have radios with the frequency the convoy was on or if there was a rule against it) so had to relay the warning and recommended alternate routes back to their own base.
There that would go up through the chain of command until reaching someone who was able to talk to a counterpart in the army, then down the chain of command in the army and finally to the convoy. By then the alternate routes the plane had found were no longer applicable, and the convoy might have even already reached the ambush.
When they got past that it would just happen again farther along with another ambush.
> 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."
While true, it is also true the person that controls if information can be released or not from military channels, aka the commander in chief, is also the one that has several high profile news stories cooking
Well there was reports that this information was leaked and the news media had this information days before it was officially reported but the news media chose not to report on that leaked information which is also curious
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.
They informed the incident commander. The people who needed to know did, and the public remained in the dark. While it may dishearten some, it was probably the right call.
Plus in the dark or not, I think most people understood what must have happened there, and only a very few die-hard optimists expected a different result.
> 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
Actually, they probably do like announcing to the world “we heard it”, to hype up their capabilities and spook their adversaries. That’s why you wait, you don’t want to say you heard it and be wrong.
> 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.
> subs are the only truly strategic component of nuclear arms
I used to think this. But land-based missiles are essential for MAD, as a nuclear sponge and by being cheap. They also protect against a technological horizon over which subs are unmasked. (There is a great scene in The Expanse which contemplates such a horizon.)
What I can’t get my head around are nuclear bombers, which largely seem to be for posturing [1].
Unlike the other parts of the nuclear triad, bombers can be recalled at any point before they start dropping weapons (there is no destruct code for ICBMs or SLBMs). So they give a President more flexibility.
> They also protect against a technological horizon over which subs are unmasked.
I’ve read speculation that Russia boomers are followed at all times by at least one fast attack, and they can listen for sounds like missile bay doors opening. I have no sources, but given the state of Russia navy it seems plausible.
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.
It wasn’t quite 40 years ago, but there’s a line in the film The Hunt for Red October (1990) that explicitly describes SOSUS as a submarine “warning net”. Knowing Tom Clancy, I’d guess there are similar references in the book (1984).
If it was meant to be a secret it wasn’t well-kept.
Yes, people knew it's true purpose then. They were wrong about how it was laid out, but people knew about it. It was declassified 30 years ago or so. And much of it was not top secret, just secret. We use entirely different computers and networks for "just" secret vs. unclassified vs. "top" secret.
The exact way they do it now, where they do it, etc. is the secret. The mere existence of a sensitive listening system is not a secret that endangers national security if known; the opposite is true, we want people to know/think they can't move a tennis ball underwater without us hearing it. Knowing enough about it to get past it is such a secret.
> 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.
So the name, and internal designation, is "top secret"? You're saying the capabilities are also secret but the newspaper just reported the data it generated, which certainly suggests what its capabilities are.
And why is it "widely known" that the military has this listening system? If it's really "top secret" then no, the public shouldn't know about it. Seems like everything is "top secret" until someone wants to show off all the cool toys.
I think existence of automatic surveillance isn't a secret.
The secret bits would include what this can detect, but I guess the presumption here is that an imploding civilian sub is easier to hear than a Russian military sub. So not really giving anything away.
That's ridiculous though, either it is "top secret" or it isn't. There shouldn't be some arbitrary sliding scale of what's ok to reveal and what's not.
There kinda is though, this is true for almost all military gear: it's quite hard to hide the existance of a new tank once you're actually making it in large quantities, for example, but the detailed drawings of it, and the test results showing the strengths and weaknesses of it will be varying levels of secret. In the case of a listening system, it's the kind of thing which is pretty obvious to do, but the exact nature and means of it being secret makes sense (cageyness about the name of the system is odder: but it may be a concern about revealing exactly which system this came from, assuming there's multiple, for correlation with other information which may be less public).
(The same thing happened with the snowden leaks, BTW: it was suspected for a long time that the NSA or FBI had a survellance system similar to PRISM, because it's the kind of thing that they would want to do and have the means to do, even absent any concrete evidence of its existance. The leaks just confirmed the existance undeniably and also showed how extensive it was)
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.
I can understand that, if the reporter is not aware that the information is secret. But clearly they do know this is a "top secret" system, it's in the headline, so I'd assume the plausible deniability excuse doesn't apply.
The First Amendment doesn't mention anything about secrets, that's not what this is about. If I sell you a stolen item, and you know it is stolen, you're guilty of a crime. If you later try to sell or move those goods, that's a more severe crime, fencing. In this case the reporter is obtaining "stolen" information and passing it along, it's exactly the "fencing" of information.
I'm aware this practice has been going on for decades, people leaking private and/or classified information, often illegally. But it's like money laundering, just "info" laundering through an "unnamed source," and it feels pretty sleazy.
The Supreme Court had ruled that the publication of secret information is a first amendment issue[0]. Stolen information is fine. Theft has not a thing to do with it.
Normal citizens have no obligation to keep the secrets of any government organisation. It is the person who holds security clearance that leaks the document that commits a crime, whereas journalists have a constitutionally protected right to publish. It's not sleazy, and is part of a healthy system that holds governments to account.
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.
How exactly can we compare these? The controlled vacuum implosion is 1 atmosphere outside and “a vacuum” inside, which would approach 0 atmospheres. The Titan is 380 atmospheres outside and 1 atmosphere inside. 380/1 is easy to calculate, but how do you calculate 1/~0?
It's ugly, it's only at 300ft, and it's an equivalent of a leaking valve, so they're not going from inside atmosphere to outside pressure in an instant.
At their depth, where presumably the carbon fibre let go, it's probably a lot faster too. At least they won't be able to even register what's going on.
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.
While the physical trauma would have been instantaneous, they might have known it was going to happen. James Cameron just said in an interview[0] that they had a sensor system inside which detects when the hull is starting to fail, and that they probably had warning because they had dropped their weights to ascend.
Once they locate the wreckage, if the weights aren't nearby that's a strong sign they were detached before the implosion. They would have fallen to a different location on the seafloor than the hull because they're denser and have a smaller cross-section, thus not affected as much by the hydrodynamics during the fall.
I thought the drop weights were held on by electromagnets--essentially a dead-man switch kind of fail-safe. So therefore when the power failed due to the implosion the weights would drop.
Not an expert, but seeing hydrolic press videos using carbon fibre it snaps instantly, also seeing ocean gate videos they don't cross weave the carbon fibre
Because the executed's family still have a right to bury their dead, not poor him in closed casket. Besides, once the person is executed, it's considered they paid for their actions and deserve basic human decency.
Man. Retributive justice done in a potentially more painful way so that family members can do a ritual on your corpse. I hope our society continues becoming more enlightened. :D
Can you imagine the torture of waiting to be turned into a "meat cloud"? It's also probably prohibitively expensive to construct a "meat cloud device".
In a sizable volume of gas the air molecules have a lot of room to bounce around. Moving molecules and them hitting things is heat. So suddenly having a lot less room results in much more frequent impacts. Frequency of impacts is heat, so it becomes hotter. We'd sort of normally consider it the overall average velocity of the molecules, but if they never hit anything they never transfer energy, and aren't measured (or measurable). But when they hit things they transfer some of that energy and it's measured as heat as an aggregate.
So biggish volume of gas, suddenly in a tiny volume: huge spike in heat because all the molecules now slamming into each other and the people inside.
I'd say it would be very unpleasant, but it's so fast and so violent that exceeds the speed of human thought, so they felt nothing and just sort of stopped existing as corporeal beings faster than they could possibly comprehend the change in circumstances. They were. And then they weren't.
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?
This reminds me of a thorough and depressing write up of the lost hikers in a south western desert. An experienced search and rescue guy spent years finding where they perished, navigating bureaucracy and the arid landscape even though the victims were certainly deceased.
Well there goes my evening. thank ya kindly for sharing sir. I hear tell lots of independent people who are doing things anyway, like magnet fishers or sonar people and the like. Lots of times local PD's are very hostile like that story sort of indicated about the local sheriff with sharing information, threatening tresspassing where there ain't no tresspass or laws broken, refusing to share any information, things like that. Wish that sorta thing would stop. Meanwhile you get others who welcome any help at all and seems to me like they usually get answers that way at least by exclusion. We could use more of that where people got the skills and stuff to do it safely, but that's my mostly ignorant guess of the situation. Don't know nothin about SAR or the like so take my limited notion for what it is I suppose.
If you've more to tell or share I'd be much obliged
the same searcher documents the search for Bill at a nearby park, and whom was finally found just recently. There’s some good YouTube on the theory on that one.
There's a guy whose truck was found in the bushes off a gravel road in the mountains. Subsequent searching turned up camping equipment and a laptop. He had terminal cancer. Some years later I spotted a thigh bone that turned out to be from a moose.
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.
That doesn't matter, dude. This is all set up on an ICS model. They're highly coordinated. Turn on your news sometime and one guy, a fire chief, a sheriff, or maybe rarely a military guy will be speaking and it won't be because they rock-paper-scissored for it.
I'm the last person to deny the massive frustrating bureaucracy that is the US military, but in this kind of thing, that's not an issue.
Former O-4 17 alpha. I was even less connected to the Coast Guard than the Navy is, but since they do port security, including cyber, if there was an issue there they were involved.
Of course it's possible, but this isn't one of those things. Certain aspects of the systems are breathtakingly reported as "top secret" in the press, but the existence of sonar systems good at hearing and sifting noise to recognize that kind of sound is widely known. We know Coca Cola exists. Hell we know the ingredients, but we don't know the recipe.
One of the first things I imagine an incident commander would do would be to ask if anyone has anything like that. Any ships in the area, military or civilian or foreign hear/see anything that they know of. Sounds like he got that information soon. Does that mean the whole thing was a waste of time?
Without knowing more about exactly what they did or didn't do, I can't say. And whether they should have done all of this is besides the point. They decided to do a search. And until they could connect that sound with the vessel, they needed to keep looking.
This is why stupid people doing stupid shit isn't just a Darwin Award situation. Search and rescue types don't want to stop until they succeed and you're putting them at risk too. They leave bodies on Everest, I would hope this was only ever just to confirm they were dead and no one was going down there but who knows.