Top secret U.S. Navy system heard titan implosion days ago
wsj.comThose 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.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Blind-Mans-Bluff-Submarine-Espionage/...
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.
Ask an LLM to rewrite it?
Right, I don't think it took a top-secret listening system either - those subs can hear snow falling in NY from half way across the atlantic.
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.
I don't think they were pretending to look, they were just (rightly) remaining open to it being either rescue or recovery. From the article:
> “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.
> 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.
Eh…
The US military, Coast Guard included, is an exercise in readiness. Responding to something happening is probably as good an exercise as any.
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.
> hopeless and not really worth pursuing
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.
> the media got a great story.
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
> what was so great about this story [?]
> catastrophic consequences of hubris meeting ignorance
Icarus calling. People have been telling this story for thousands of years.
If you are the media, a good story is one that drives clicks.
It seems like this story did that.
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.
Would be easier if they had shared Slack channels
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.
Saw the movie, but don’t remember that being part of the plot.
Best I can do is a flat file message transfer that runs weekly (with 18% success rate) between branch mainframes.
So, Teams?
As opposed to JSON push-notification payloads over webhooks run by a SASS GovCallbacks.io and costing 15$ a month for?
Implemented by IBM using Oracle, for some reason.
Or maybe a Discord server, where they could share all their Top Secret...
OOPS! nevermind.
>“While not definitive, this information was immediately shared with the Incident Commander to assist with the ongoing search and rescue mission.”
Well, they can't prove what they heard wasn't a different sub imploding.
Perhaps they can triangulate
afaik they did, and helped narrow the search area
> 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.
You don't think they should have looked for it regardless...?
If they heard an implosion at the time the sub lost contact? No. There would be a search and recovery operation, not search and rescue.
I'd liken it to a space shuttle blowing up, the incident isn't compatible with life.
Hearing the implosion is very different from seeing it. I don’t think it’s as certain.
They probably heard something and now know it was an implosion.
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."
>I'm pretty sure the Navy also knows what was causing the "banging" heard underwater during the search.
Obviously, an Orca rave.
It is almost like they needed the news to be distracted for some reason....
hmmm
Sometimes, on a planet with 8 billion people, more than one newsworthy event happen concurrently without coordination or conspiracy.
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
The US military isn’t the only military. US news isn’t the only news.
Because no-one ever leaks info in large bureaucracies?
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
Ever heard the phrase "when you hear hooves, think horses, not zebra"?
The media probably chose not to report it for the same reason the Coastguard didn't say "They're dead, let's go home" until they found confirmation.
Hunter Bidens pp blew up the sub and the plans were on his laptop. Checkmate atheists.
If you genuinely believe that, then I've got a Jewish space laser to sell you.
What's the other story?
See? The distraction is working!
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.
Is schtum jidisch? The german word is stumm.
Wiktionary says it’s an alternate spelling of “shtum”
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/shtum
(English, from Yiddish)
Yes, it's been adopted in Cockney English from Yiddish influence.
This article is written in a strange way.
> 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.
There was an Argentinian one, 2017.
> 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...
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.
One might say that subs are the only truly strategic component of nuclear arms.
> 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].
[1] https://www.airuniversity.af.edu/Portals/10/SSQ/documents/Vo...
> What I can’t get my head around are nuclear bombers, which largely seem to be for posturing
Posturing is super important, strategically, though. Also, nuclear-capable bombers double as conventional bombers, so there’s that.
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.
What scene in the expanse is that?
Well heck I just argued with a bunch of people, who said the USN knew but would never tell anyone and me saying it's a baseless claim.
I guess we were both wrong.
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.
That's a good point actually.
Similarly they claim the implosion was detected and triangulated but the banging went undetected until sonar buoys were deployed.
Well, we've had US intelligence, and specifically SOSUS, make its way to the public before, like with [0]
They used SOSUS to detect what happened to the USS Scorpion when it disappeared.
Wasn't disclosed until many, many years later. SOSUS was highly classified until very recently.
SOSUS may have been classified but you could read about it 40+ years ago.
But not it's true purpose: tracking Soviet submarines.
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.
Script written in 1982. People thought he had access to classified info, but he didn't.[1] He was just using what we now call OSINT. There is a lot more about SOSUS in Red Storm Rising which was only a few years later.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1986/08/12/books/author-of-red-octob...
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.
Or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOSUS (article created 2003)
Ouch, things were getting heated.
> I guess we were both wrong.
Optimistic.
> 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.
Ocean acidity also impacts acoustic transmission, one of the leading causes of noise pollution for fish.
> an implosion or explosion
Don't they have different sound signatures and so they're able to determine whether it's the former or the latter?
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)
I'll note that Snowden, whatever you think of him, had the balls to come forward and put his name on all his disclosures. He got help from journalists as far as summarizing and prioritizing and coordinating with major newspapers but he never was "an anonymous source" or "a person with knowledge of the meeting."
As to the other points, when some top secret info does get revealed, legally or not, and the public reaction is pretty much, ehh, we already assumed that -- that seems like a pretty big failing of the whole concept of "secret." And on the other hand, I'll grant you a few exceptions, like the names of spies, position of gear or troops, perhaps the detailed weapons specs like you mentioned -- but when the name of this system is "top secret" and seemingly well over 90% of what is marked "classified" lacks any informational value whatsoever, that's a failing in the other direction, people stop caring about "secret" because so little of it is actually important.
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.
It's not about plausible deniability. They know the information is top secret. They asked the Navy for comment and were probably told that.
The 1st amendment still protects the reporter. They are legally in the clear. The person who told them is not.
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.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Times_Co._v._United...
The First Amendment is a constant, like a straight line, applicable to every American and all speech. The First Amendment gives you the right to say anything. However, the courts have recognized that there are a few rules that supersede even the First Amendment -- the classic "can't say fire in a crowded theater," but also libel, blatantly false advertising, etc. It's not that the First Amendment doesn't apply, but some other law or rule has higher priority, i.e. above that flat, constant line that is the 1st.
A government official privy to classified information is subject to secrecy rules that supersede the 1st. The question at issue is whether a journalist who becomes privy to the the same classified information is subject to the same rules. "The question before the court was whether the constitutional freedom of the press, guaranteed by the First Amendment, was subordinate to a claimed need of the executive branch of government to maintain the secrecy of information." i.e. which takes priority, the 1st, or rules about secrecy (the Espionage Act, in this case).
From your wikipedia article: "New York Times v. United States ... did not void the Espionage Act or give the press unlimited freedom to publish classified documents." The Court did not say that journalists have free reign, they simply refused to grant an injunction against publication. While this, and subsequent cases, certainly signal wide breadth of press freedom, it's not absolute and not a guarantee against a future prosecution.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/03/22/521009791...
FBI Director James Comey demurred. "That's a harder question, as to whether a reporter incurs criminal liability by publishing classified information," Comey said.
freedom of the press is not absolute, even in the U.S. According to a recent paper from the Congressional Research Service, the question is far from settled
The justices didn't block the government from exercising what's called "prior restraint" — that is, preventing a news organization from publishing or broadcasting news.
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.
"holding governments to account" is rarely a function of classified information, it's typically revelation of some corruption that was found via some kind of investigative work -- and almost always via public documents, hence the importance of the FOIA.
When leaked classified documents show something highly troubling, like the Snowden leaks or Wikileaks, the government doubles down and does everything it can to punish those leakers to the maximum extent, which is not what a "healthy system" would do to a whistleblower exposing illegal or corrupt activity.
eh, not quite. The laws which protect secret information apply to everyone (it does require that you have reason to believe the information is secret, but it does not require that you have clearance). There are however quite powerful defenses considering the 1st amendment, especially for journalists (in other countries this often much less strong, though usually there's something analogous. For example the somewhat famous idea of signing the official secrets act in the UK doesn't mean anything except that the penalties for breaking it get more severe: you can still expect to be prosecuted under it if you are handed information marked as secret and then pass it on, unless you can succesfully argue that it is somehow in the public interest for it to be published).
Does this mean the passengers had an instantaneous death?
I believe James Cameron called it being turned into a, "meat cloud."
Absolutely occurred in under 30ms (upper bound). Possibly as quick as 2ms, and in all likelihood well under 10ms.
Rough estimates, but at that depth, it’s around 450 atmospheres of pressure, or around 6,500 lbs per square inch. Pretty much instantaneous.
blink of an eye is 100ms on average so it was faster than the blink of an eye.
They died faster than their brain could process any pain.
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 not 380/1, it's 380-1. 379bar of dp vs 1bar dp. So 379 times worse, ish.
Yes.
Mythbusters did an episode showing what happens to a human body under deep sea implosion
> https://youtu.be/LEY3fN4N3D8
It's ugly.
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.
How do we know the weights where dropped before the immplosion
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
Damn, why don't we execute people that way (if we're still executing people, that is)?
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".
It sounds gruesome, but maybe some people have a preference ?
Incinerated? Where did the fire come from?
When you compress all the gas in a volume quickly it gets very hot. This is how a Diesel engine works.
Like a diesel engine igniting just from pressurizing the cylinder...?
Mantis Shrimp kill using a similar concept
Video showing a Mantis Shrimp punching a shell incredibly quickly it creates a vacuum which generates intense heat and a flame .. under water!
Heat of compression
P V = n R T
An attempt at an ExplainLikeImFive answer:
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WD7CfnQC5HQ
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.
Likely crushed and incinerated into ash (air will get very hot) all in less than 100ms.
Yes
They went from alive, to clouds of molecules faster than humans can perceive. So effectively, yes.
Where did the comment about SOSUS go? That's the passive hydrophone system used 50 years ago.
How deep is it? https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-06-23/titanic-submersible-d...
Calculation and modeling only takes you so far.
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?
Predicted in a HN comment on the first post about the missing incident here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36393019
If there was no mention of it, I would assume they heard it and did not way to disclose the accuracy of their kit.
When it is "leaked" I assume they heard nothing and don't want to disclose the (in)accuracy of their kit.
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.
"It really depends" is as good as you're likely going to get.
Read up on underwater acoustic propagation to see why. Lots of interacting variables that can reflect, scatter, focus, alter affect absorption etc.
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?
Implosion's too fast to be captured unless you're using a dedicated high-speed camera.
Is it a top secret system now?
So, we spent all the time and money confirming what USN already knew?
You can't "know" with 100% certainty from a sound, and generally searchers don't give up until they must.
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.
Aahh, you're probably talking about Tom Mahood's: The Hunt for the Death Valley Germans. They were in Death Valley NP.
An epic and gripping tale for sure. It made quite an impression on me as I was joining my local SAR team.
https://www.otherhand.org/home-page/search-and-rescue/the-hu...
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.
Been lookin over that and it's a very interesting one. The man has got to have done the most extensive and exhaustive search for a missing person in goddamn history damn near by himself what with all the criss-crossing lines and different search methods. There's a kind of fascination with that sort of dedication makes one darn near want to jump up and volunteer just from the pull of it.
Though have to edit to say, I can't goddamn believe they didn't save the cell data. Good lord. So many kinds of frustration reading over this stuff while I'm waitin here today.
This video offered a good theory based on all data: https://youtu.be/2J9wsJb8P1Y
A sobering realization how dangerous a simple walk can be.
I had stumbled my way there, but I appreciate it in case I hadn't. I should have linked that once I found it in my edit on reflection so much obliged sir for the help there
my thinking is there's a lot of learning to be had from people who are doing this kind of thing. How much faster could we find people if we act like they've got good reasons to them that got them lost? Like with bad maps. Or even being better able to find people while they're alive if things like those maps and other things are looked over and you try to mentally figure out what they think might make sense? Walk a mile in someone's shoes. I ain't no expert on this but I keep reading police reports or park reports on missing people and a lot of times it seems like searchers mistake their idea of the fact with the lost persons idea of the fact. am I crazy or does that seem like a really big mistake? I'd like to know more just don't know where to go learning more about this sorta thing
One thing to remember is that for the major agencies the rescue part is important; so they will search all the likely survivable locations first because those are the best chance of saving a life, even if there are technically more likely locations that assume death.
It’s also why the “tell people where you’re planning on going, don’t leave the trail, stick to the plan, make it easy to find you” are important survival techniques.
Even just learning how to make markings on the ground that can be seen from low-flying aircraft may save you someday (contact a local civil air patrol and ask to go along on a training flight to see how hard it can be to identify even something as large as a plane from the air).
Sorry since I don't know about it I probably explained myself very bad. I did mean about the rescue part. Like the guy was still alive while they were searching so I wonder how important getting into the persons head is for "figure out what makes sense to that person given what they know" to finding people before they die especially. Like could they have found the guy if they looked at the maps people knew he had, and saw that the topography thing makes it look to someone who doesn't know the area that well that it might be the best way to get toward the road again if he got lost? That's what I'm trying to get at. The lessons these guys learn trying to piece together where someone ended up and how they died it seems really important to learn those lessons to find people before they die too.
I'm sorry I don't know any of the terms for search and rescue or anything so I have no idea how to make what I am saying make sense.
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.
Good OPSEC comes at a price.
USN != USCG. See my other comment in this thread that can explain it well.
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.
Wouldn't it be possible, if the Navy program were too secret, that they had no counterpart in the Coast Guard cleared for it?
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.