According to the Wall Street Journal¹, the U.S. Navy used a top-secret detection system to spot enemy submarines and heard what it believed was the Titan implosion hours after it lost contact. The Navy did not reveal this information to the public or the Coast Guard until days later¹³. Maybe they didn't want to expose their sound detection skills or capabilities to the world, especially to their potential adversaries. This is not the first time that the U.S. military has used sound detection for secret purposes. In the late 1940s, they launched Project Mogul², a top secret project involving microphones flown on high-altitude balloons to detect sound waves generated by Soviet atomic bomb tests².
My father was a sonarman in the Navy during the 70's. Before he got out he told me they declassified a shitload of data they collected from the positions of whales and gave it to some marine biology department of a university somewhere. They were like, "It's probably all unusable shit, but we'll look at it." Turns out it was the most detailed and sophisticated tracking data they had ever seen. Even more so than the state of the art radio trackers they were using. Turns out the Navy knows a lot about where things are in the water.
I had to do a bit of research since it's been a long time since I thought about it, and wanted to look it up. It was called SOSUS and they gave the whale data to NOAA.
SOSUS is a line of underwater microphones, range would be a simple matter of triangulation. They had ~1 mile accuracy in the 1970s, and they probably are much better now.
I'd agree with that. Knowing how sneaky you can be and still get picked up is a secret. Knowing that an extremely un-sneaky thing just off the Canadian coast is above that threshold is hardly any information at all.
According to the Wall Street Journal¹, the U.S. Navy used a top-secret detection system to spot enemy submarines and heard what it believed was the Titan implosion hours after it lost contact. The Navy did not reveal this information to the public or the Coast Guard until days later¹³. Maybe they didn't want to expose their sound detection skills or capabilities to the world, especially to their potential adversaries. This is not the first time that the U.S. military has used sound detection for secret purposes. In the late 1940s, they launched Project Mogul², a top secret project involving microphones flown on high-altitude balloons to detect sound waves generated by Soviet atomic bomb tests².
(1) U.S. Navy Heard What It Believed Was Titan Implosion Days Ago. https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-navy-detected-titan-sub-implosion-days-ago-6844cb12 Accessed 23/06/2023. (2) Navy Detected Titanic Sub's Implosion Soon After It Went ... - Insider. https://www.insider.com/navy-detected-titanic-subs-implosion-soon-after-went-missing-wsj-2023-6 Accessed 23/06/2023. (3) Project Mogul - Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Mogul Accessed 23/06/2023.
So, uh... I guess it's OK to expose those capabilities now?
My father was a sonarman in the Navy during the 70's. Before he got out he told me they declassified a shitload of data they collected from the positions of whales and gave it to some marine biology department of a university somewhere. They were like, "It's probably all unusable shit, but we'll look at it." Turns out it was the most detailed and sophisticated tracking data they had ever seen. Even more so than the state of the art radio trackers they were using. Turns out the Navy knows a lot about where things are in the water.
I had to do a bit of research since it's been a long time since I thought about it, and wanted to look it up. It was called SOSUS and they gave the whale data to NOAA.
https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history-magazine/2021/february/66-years-undersea-surveillance
Marked Trans Secret: For xer eyes only
Isn't that the title of the next bond film?
SOSUS is a line of underwater microphones, range would be a simple matter of triangulation. They had ~1 mile accuracy in the 1970s, and they probably are much better now.
Lol if they can't tell the distance to the boom, then it's not top secret technology
We've known since at least the early 90s the navy had a set up to listen across most of the ocean for things like this.
I'm not sure how it's "top secret"
Yeah, sosus isn't exactly unknown or novel. Means and methods maybe.
I'd agree with that. Knowing how sneaky you can be and still get picked up is a secret. Knowing that an extremely un-sneaky thing just off the Canadian coast is above that threshold is hardly any information at all.