Will be interesting this century to see if increased sensor coverage in the ocean leads to more detection of USOs (unidentified submerged objects). Would love it if a curious billionaire would fund detection systems as anecdotally it seems USO and UFO (same thing?) activity is centered around oceans and coasts, especially off Santa Catalina Island as well as Virginia Beach.
Both virginia beach and catalina are near military infrastructure. Some of the channel islands are owned by the navy entirely. I'd wager that these are just training exercises by our own government. If the U.S. government had some new underwater based drone that could fool current gen fighters, they'd be testing this tech near their coastal military bases instead of in area 51 in the nevada desert because that's the only place to test this stuff out, near an ocean. Plus the bases are carrying out regular training sorties all the time anyhow, so there is always military equipment in the air that you can test against without having to plan a new flightplan and therefore raise suspicion just to test your equipment.
I suspect the reason the military decided to go on a public PR campaign about UAPs is to keep people looking for foreign drones zipping around. There's a distributed network of hundreds of millions of phone cameras in every corner of the country, and the UAP meme can be the motivation to record and amplify sightings of adversarial drones.
Also, admitting that adversaries might be/are flying drones in US territory would be embarrassing domestically and internationally, and could cause a panic. Steeping it in mystery and hinting at "aliens" is silly and interesting enough to be a harmless spectacle.
I don't think adversaries would be so brazen just for the sake of not having their equipment captured. It was a huge risk for the US to fly U2s over enemy territory because they would get shot down and the USSR reverse engineered one of them:
I think drone designs have become so disposable that the value of collected intelligence and dick-waving outweigh the risk of being caught and reverse engineered. Such programs have value in intelligence and psyops against the US.
I think we'd also be shocked at just how trivial some of the drones are that are able to evade defenses or detection. I suspect we're good at detecting airplane-sized targets, maybe even ICMB-sized targets, but we have little to detect and stop drone-sized targets that can fly at relatively low altitudes, can be launched from inside the US, are easily smuggled and assembled domestically, etc.
It just makes you wonder what they would even be spying on if they were adversaries, because you could just go to san onofre beach with a set of binoculars if you wanted to observe these formations coming out of camp pendleton in an even more discrete manner than some newfangled drone that the military might very well detect, because you can never be sure of the adversaries capabilities. Dick waving ruins the element of surprise and also invites an arms race, that you'd be a fool to play against the US military industrial complex.
> It just makes you wonder what they would even be spying on if they were adversaries, because you could just go to san onofre beach with a set of binoculars if you wanted to observe these formations coming out of camp pendleton in an even more discrete manner than some newfangled drone that the military might very well detect, because you can never be sure of the adversaries capabilities
Reports of such sightings took place within restricted airspace, sometimes at sea and sometimes during training missions at sea. I imagine a close-up look at things from better vantage points could be valuable, especially if they're doing signals intelligence.
I also see it as power projection and tickling the dragon's tail. Russia and China both have histories of doing similar things with jets and warships. Russia has a history of doing this with jets[1], they recently had their jets come "within 5 feet" of US Navy planes[2], as well as doing the same with their navy[3][4]. China, too[5][6][7].
> Dick waving ruins the element of surprise and also invites an arms race, that you'd be a fool to play against the US military industrial complex.
Adversaries have a history of dick-waving, as does the US, and I don't think there's much of surprise in the fact that they're interested in espionage/psyops. IMO, that arms race started a long time ago, and our military puts out PR pieces about how they're using and developing drones for all types of applications. I don't think there's much risk with exposing advanced tech, either. I think Mick West did a good job at explaining the videos that are purported to show UAPs doing incredible things[8], and I don't believe those are actually highly advanced drones capable of bending the laws of physics.
The point of drones is that they are cheap, disposable and easy to mass produce, so I don't think any groundbreaking advances in tech are being deployed here. Also, using drones sends the message that for every 1 drone the US detects now, they could've easily sent thousands, or more, if they wanted to.
Ultimately, I think it's a mix of intelligence collecting and sending the message that they can get this close, they're watching and there's not much the US can do about it.
The DoD did not decide to “go public” on UAP. The guy running the UAP program for the pentagon went rogue after he was denied a meeting with Secretary Mattis to discuss the national security implications of UAP in our airspace.
I didn't say they "[went] public", I said they "[went] on a public PR campaign", which is what they're still doing. I wasn't making a comment on who broke the story, I am commenting on the existence of the years-long PR campaign that the military keeps choosing write press releases about.
Counterargument: it could be that recent detections of UFOS are just more likely at these installations as that's where our best sensors are (our best ships and aircraft) most often, in other words there are other hotspots of activity but we don't have military sensors in those areas 24/7.
But if a civilian group pushed on this, we'd at least find out where the limits are before gov/military stopping it. Actually, UAPx went and tried to record with sensors off Catalina but I believe only for a week. Loeb's Galileo Project will likely place optical sensors near these hotspots but haven't seen any mention by them of sonar or acoustic monitoring.
If it was too-secret-project-x, why tell the normal navy? Especially if it didn’t have or require a pilot that could get killed if someone shot it down.
*UAP. There is something going on, but it’s very unclear what it is. Hard to tell right now if the “threat” knows it’s targeting military (might even be us), or if the military has the only sensors/opportunities to have these encounters.
That said, let’s speed this up. The Kraken is always in the last 5%, and C’thulhu is always the very last place you look.
Falcon 2: 2-9 we're getting an awfully weird visual on the hyperspectral module feed, some kind of a strange formation off the coast of Florida, looks like some kind of winged tentacle monster waving his hands causing a landmass to rise out of the sea. Anyone else hearing something that sounds like "R'lyeh" on comms?
Falcon 1: confirming Falcon 2's visual, seeing the same thing... and my dead son from a decade ago... transmission dies
I'd hope so. There are a lot of cases where people end up missing with no traces left and random people such as YouTubers make a sport of it to search for lost vehicles underwater to assist search efforts, such as e.g. [1].
The problem is that at the moment pretty much the only technology available to map ocean floors at scale is sonar, which gets more imprecise with increasing depth. For individual SAR ops, robotic AUVs can be used such as in the search for the MH370 wreck, but as that effort has shown that doesn't scale well unless you can really narrow down the potential submergence site as was done with AF447.
At the core, the enemy is simple physics - the deeper the body of water, the less light penetrates down to the sea floor, and anything RF-based is out of the game as well.
> Ocean floor topography also helps identify underwater hazards
You think the ocean is mostly empty, until your nuclear powered attack submarine runs into a previously uncharted (or incorrectly charted) submarine mountain
On 8 January 2005 at 02:43 GMT, San Francisco collided with an undersea mountain about 364 nautical miles (675 km) southeast of Guam while operating at flank (maximum) speed at a depth of 525 feet (160 m).
military submarines do not as a matter of practice run around in general navigation pinging things, because that kind of defeats the purpose of hiding where you are
The passive sonar from their own prop noise would easily show a mountain. There is a reason about 30 people were demoted due to the incident. Bottom line is they weren’t paying attention to their sonar.
Passive sonar shows "things making noise". It doesn't show things that do not make noise.
Mountains do not, as a general rule, make noise, and do not show up on passive sonar.
In addition, when running at flank speed the efficiency of passive sonar is greatly degraded by flow and machinery noises.
The way a submarine avoids running into seamounts is a combination of very good maps, very good dead reckoning, (IIRC) gravitational anomaly detection (tied to more great maps), and if all else fails high-frequency (short-range) active sonar. It's a really interesting system! But I don't think passive sonar ties into it.
Mountains do make noise when they reflect the sound your prop makes. I took the gp to refer to that. Whether you can use that for collision avoidance, no idea.
There's a few problems with this. For one, your prop noise is going to be almost entirely masked directly ahead of you, because there's a whole submarine in the way. Isolating "sound of our propellers from in front of us" from "our propellers behind us" is certain to be extremely difficult if it's not completely impossible too.
I've got no idea where jcampbell pulled their information from, but I've never seen anything to even suggest it's possible to use your own prop and machinery noises like that.
There's a whole series of highly classified inertial navigation units used in aviation and submarine applications. The ones for use above the ocean's surface have many DoD applications in a theoretical GPS-jammed environment in warfare against an equal-tech adversary.
I've got no clue about the downvotes either. Maybe because the first version of the comment was a little snarky, and didn't include how submarines actually avoid crashing into things?
I believe there have been successful experiments to detect underwater mountains by their gravitational pull, but I don't think it's an operational system type thing. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5345843
and also, I wanted to mention another submarine navigation technique that the Soviet Russians pioneered. I thought it was called Crazy Ivan but I just looked that up and that's Soviet Russian submarinery, but not this one. The idea is to carefully map the ocean floor features in a particular area, and water currents, and know your boat well, and use that information to "blindly run a route" at high speed. I'm not an expert but something like, when submarines are traveling at speed, stuff like sonar (at least the quiet kind) is useless because of all the turbulence around the boat, so the Russians figured out they didn't need to be stealthier to evade US subs in the Baltic, they just needed to know where they were and then go fast. The goal was to get to the open sea were it's easier to get loast in the vastness. Maybe these Navy subs were trying something like that.
What do you propose? Any sonar-equivalent involves broadcasting (in this context, broadcasting nearly continuously). Any broadcast makes it trivial to locate you.
Submarines go to great lengths to be as quiet as possible so that the acoustics of the engine, ship, etc. can't be caught in a microphone. Any sort of EM radiation is child's play to trace compared to that. The content of the message and the frequency of the message don't matter - any sort of signal means you can be monitored and your location determined.
The threat model isn't a torpedo, it's knowing where the enemy's subs are (and aren't). "There's a sub within half a mile of this point" is likely 90% as bad as "there's a sub exactly here" for most missions.
While water motors are not exactly my area of expertise, I would also expect that drone/torpedo motors are significantly louder than submarine engines and that launching or recovering a drone is itself a fairly noisy event that exposes the sub to traditional acoustic tracking.
Sure, all valid issues. It for sure would expose the general vicinity.
In terms of noise, keep in mind that submarines have all sorts of concessions already. A diesel-electric sub is quieter than a nuclear sub, but it has to surface every two days or so to get air to run its very noisy diesel generators.
I think a battery powered electric drone should be far quieter than any sub technology we have (steam/nuke is loud, diesel is louder). The quiet systems we have are all electric and therefore have limited energy capacity.
Is detection of EM radiation really that easy? Broad parts of the EM spectrum are heavily attenuated by water - this is what makes underwater comms difficult.
Sure. You can transmit the sonar from a different location. A hidden sub could send out a drone to make the sonar pings from a different location. You'll be giving away the location of the drone, rather than the sub. There's still an issue around detecting that a sub is in the general vicinity, of course.
or more conventionally, you build a fleet of oceanographic survey ships which operate in the open navigating international waters, collecting vast data sets of bathymetric information... obviously not perfect yet.
there is also the danger that a drone emitting sonar pings may be indistinguishable to a third party from a live torpedo, and makes it look like you're preparing to attack somebody you really don't want to start a war with (China, etc).
Your drone would need to be really close to the sub to provide any useful information - so close that you’d definitely be exposing the submarines locations unless it was quieter than the sub. Which good luck with that.
Any active sonar would likely paint the submarine anyway too for any passive sonar listeners.
A mile is far, far too close then. A square mile of ocean is a VERY small search place compared to what they would start with.
And how would the drone know to 'flash the flashlight' where it was useful to the sub without the sub somehow communicating to the drone? Which would require the sub to emit something, or preprogram it before release.
Not to mention, unless the sub stayed in one place or somehow communicated with the drone, it would have to stay in one place to have any chance to recover it. Even then, odds of finding the hidden black spot on it’s own with inertial guidance aren’t great if it’s away for long.
If it was programmed into the drone when it was launched, just the drone coming to and from the sub would draw a giant red line to and from the sub. It would also severely restrict the sub - it either has to program in a path, in which case the drone will illustrate where the sub WILL BE shortly, or it has to do a one-off, in which case anyone could listen to/follow the drone back to the sub when it's retrieved.
Seems not very useful in practice, except as some kind of disposable thing during an attack for redirection or distraction.
A drone would be far less detectable than the sub itself when not pinging (the drone would have only electronics, no nuclear turbine), so that seems like a non-issue regarding detecting the drone while in silent running. Drones are a lot more quiet and harder to locate than nuclear subs.
A programmed path wouldn't illustrate where the drone or sub will be in advance so that's also a non-issue. You only know where the ping came from, at the time the ping was sent.
The drone could also simply surface and pick up new instructions from satellite.
I assume we will soon be moving en masse to underwater drones for reasons far beyond what's discussed here.
There are of course ocean based drones already, but they tend to be for surveillance and data gathering in general - like detecting subs. Not so much for navigation.
Autonomous ocean going drones have been common place for decades.
Fire and forget programmable torpedoes have been a thing for decades.
What makes no sense is trying to link them in some operational/controllable/recallable way to submarines which are trying to remain covert, as the communication channels give away the submarine or require them to do risky behaviors like surface for satellite comms.
So my point is, you’re not proposing anything novel where you seem to think you are, and where you think they are advantages are actually significant operational disadvantages based on actual submarine mission profiles.
1) active sonar plays havoc with marine life, and it’s not a problem that can be typically solved by shifting frequencies, as the frequencies used by certain species are used due to beneficial transmission characteristics.
Wartime sonar is so powerful it can literally kill or injure people or animals nearby in the water due to the over pressure pulse, so tends to be seen as dangerous and undesirable to use except in specific emergency circumstances.
Low energy active sonar is indeed used by a lot of folks, but due to #3, would likely have some economic issues.
2) sound can be listened to in the oceans over far longer distances than a useful return signal can be gleaned by the emitter, and tends to transmit unevenly due to factors that are difficult to impossible to predict or control like thermoclines, currents, etc. [https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/sound.html]
Listeners to an active sonar emitter can identify the location of something using triangulation even 10-100x the distance the ‘pinging’ party could get a useful return signal. (See performance here [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonar]. Think of it like shining a flashlight around in the dark. Folks miles around could see the pinprick of light easily, even if the flashlight wielder can see nothing out there, and it’s not bright enough for everyone else to see anything else either.
Listeners at 2x the distance would typically have the same clarity of view as the initial ‘pinging’ party within the area energized.
This also makes it easy to avoid for parties trying to hide. They stay 5x the distance from the active sonar, and they’re likely good, minus passive sonars listening for engine noises or whatever which are always a hazard.
And 3) distances in the ocean are huge. Much, much larger than you might be mentally modeling.
Outside of a harbor or port (which generally already have these systems), a hundred square miles of ocean is tiny.
The Atlantic Ocean is 41.2 million square miles, the pacific 63.8, and the Indian Ocean 27.
So covering any useful segment of a large shoreline can be nearly impossible economically, let alone a segment of the open ocean. Even if you wanted a sensor per 100 square miles over half of the ocean - say the most interesting/busy parts of the ocean, or approx. 70 million square miles, well, 700k drones are not going to be easy to build, maintain, etc.
For this reason, equipment tends to be carried by parties who might need it, and only deployed in areas they might need it, or deployed as fixed installations in very high value/interesting areas.
Sonobouys from helicopters, sonar arrays on ships or submarines, fixed sonar installations at harbors, ports, clandestine passive sonar arrays near expected strategic areas off coastlines, etc.
4) clandestine bandwidth is very limited.
VLF has VERY low bandwidth (depending on frequency), so low even voice transmission is generally not practical, and it still has limited penetration into water. As far as I am aware, it’s used the equivalent of submarine texting (at best), and the submarine still has to come quite close to the surface. ELF can work at operating depths, but communication is one way, and bandwidth is in the ‘bits per minute’ range [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication_with_submarine...]
ELF antennas are measured in miles and use the earths crust.
Sound in the ocean has weird transmission effects. If your quiet ‘whispered’ data gets under a thermocline, it could go 100s of km and you would be none the wiser. If it didn’t, it might go just meters. Distortion at high frequencies also makes it difficult to transmit much data this way unless the listener is close.
You’d want some kind of mesh network ideally though, as whatever node the sub is near would not be one the sub would want to approach if there was a potential enemy contact nearby, as it’s drawing a giant target on them.
If one way, that could be useful - however that also means the crypto better be really good, as one compromised node would turn the array into an enemy asset to hunt your subs, and the passive listening and mesh network model would mean you’d need to be transmitting all potentially interesting data all the time.
> 2) sound can be listened to in the oceans over far longer distances than a useful return signal can be gleaned by the emitter, and tends to transmit unevenly due to factors that are difficult to impossible to predict or control like thermoclines, currents, etc. [https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/sound.html]
This sounds exactly like the kind of thing a top secret military program would know how to do with a few petaflops of calculating power, a network of linked microphones, and a complete survey of the area. At least to ranges that would be very surprising to someone outside of that program.
But yes, anything some rando on hn thinks of in five minutes has been thought of and dismissed or thought of in detail and had problems said rando didn't think of worked through.
> you’re not proposing anything novel where you seem to think you are
I haven't suggested any novel ideas at all. I'm only pointing out something that should be obvious.
This conversation started when someone asked whether it's possible to use sonar without giving away a sub's location. It is possible. That's really all there is to it.
They're in a place where there is no lights and no sound. You have to emit something whether that be in the form of sound or in the electromagnetic spectrum in order to receive a reflection back and emissions remove stealth.
Not to mention that sonar is highly disruptive to many forms of sea life as it's incredibly loud.
the only thing I could possibly think of are receive-only apparatus like magnetometers, which are themselves used by low flying aircraft and surface ships to locate submarines. And likely of very limited value in underwater navigation unless you're in a research submarine literally hovering a few meters above some rocky metallic outcroping on a seamount.
Or something thermal sensor based, there's rumored to be systems that submarines can use passively to follow and track other submarines by the waste heat put into the water.
I'm not sure how practical they are for mapping but the sensitivity of some such sensors is so outrageous you can definitely measure well beyond a few meters of distance.
You seem generally very knowledgeable about this environment and I'm by no means an expert in the SQUID, but the way I understand it it's effectively a magnetometer with sensitivity down to about femtotesla scale. Clearly that could in principle pick up the magnetic effects of many objects well beyond a decimeter, even with consideration of the field rapidly declining with distance.
The main problem in using it, as I understand it, is rather that picking up everything the sensor could detect would usually result in an unmanageable deluge of unwanted information, and it's a normal operation context to filter the signal for distance so as to not pick up too much interference from equipment, staff, etc.
But personally I don't see any reason it would be impossible to arrange it to band-pass instead of low-pass in that filtering.
I suspect the real purpose of the Poseidon nuke torpedo is to avoid the difficulties of detecting subs by over-pressuring an enormous area all at once, like fishing with dynamite
I'm just the right age to have learned about the enormous potential of deep sea mining by being taught about it in grade school! we were gonna vacuum up manganese nodules!
I was the right age to learn about the enormous potential of deep sea mining by reading Willard Price. Actually, looking at when Underwater Adventure was written, I could have been born any year and still learn about it by that method.
I'm talking about when it was breathlessly added to the school curriculum at the time the Glomar ship was being built.
So I was saying something like "I read about leaked story of Moses parting the Red Sea in the newspaper!"; yes, you're right, anybody can learn about Moses from the Bible.
A large airliner carrying more than 200 people disappeared, and over the past 8 years, we still have not found the main body of the airplane or the black boxes.
The fuselage of a Boeing 777 has a diameter of about 3.7 meters, or about 12 feet. So you're looking for something that's less than 4 meters high, and less than 4 meters wide. If it is more or less intact the wreck might be pretty long, so on a reasonably flat ocean floor you might pick it out at 10 meters resolution, but in less ideal conditions you might need closer to 2m resolution to make it stand out against the background. There are the wings, which are very big, but also very thin, so their usefulness really depends on how they are angled.
What we have are pretty good 400x400m maps, and increasingly more 100x100m maps.
Even if we assume the whole fuselage is intact in one piece, with the wings broken off, it's possible that it fell into the mud, silt and soft squishy bottom on some abyssal plain and is more than 1/3rd buried. Making it even harder to locate than a cylinder resting on a rocky surface.
When they were doing the original scans the resolution was set by the diameter of the turbines, the logic being that they would probably be the only thing intact if it hit the water at speed.
Where in the world did you get that number? The average 777 has a fuselage width of 20 ft, 4 in or 6.20 meters. Nearly twice as large. 3.7 meters is obviously wrong if you've ever so much as glanced at one of these planes in real life or even in a photo.
That's also the first thing I think about. The disappearance of MH370 and the inability to find it combined with sea floor mapping always makes me wonder. I've always fantasized about the idea of autonomous seafloor mapping drones.
It's really a testament to just how large the ocean is. Remember there's more than twice as much sea than land and we lose things on land too. Things on land might not be under 3 miles of water that takes expensive, specialized equipment in remote locations to actually reach.
I do hope for a resolution for MH370 one day but we know the bullet points: it was a deliberate action by the pilot (and/or the co-pilot) to depressurize the plane, run it out into the ocean and (most likely) make a "soft" landing after which it would fill with water and sink. There's alot of evidence for this and no other proposed scenario fits the evidence.
> I do hope for a resolution for MH370 one day but we know the bullet points: it was a deliberate action by the pilot (and/or the co-pilot) to depressurize the plane, run it out into the ocean and (most likely) make a "soft" landing after which it would fill with water and sink. There's alot of evidence for this and no other proposed scenario fits the evidence.
I'm a certified commercial pilot and I'm researched this incident extensively.
That's the most plausible conclusion that I can come to. The precise turning to attempt to evade radar at the start (even the military radars) must have meant extremely precise planning at the start.
There are a lot of other cockpit maneuveurs and flip switching you'd have to go to during this phase but I won't get into that.
You can depressurize it at altitude to kill the passengers and then put it into the furthest reaches of the ocean.
It's a very sad situation all around but I can't find any facts that would point to other alternatives.
Why do you think that's likely? Because it was a long flight (to wherever it crashed), and pilots tend to use autopilot on long flights? Or is there some other reason?
Would the pilot be able to breathe at the altitude he was flying at? I presume he wouldn't have enough emergency oxygen for the entire time it takes to get to the presumed crash area.
Given the debris that has washed up on various coastlines, would you assume it was a soft landing or hard crash?
What's your take on theory that the plane had a fire and the pilot maneuvered the plane to a high altitude to snuff out the fire, then away from populated areas, then he himself passed away and the plane drifted on its deep ocean course until it crashed?
> What's your take on theory that the plane had a fire and the pilot maneuvered the plane to a high altitude to snuff out the fire, then away from populated areas, then he himself passed away and the plane drifted on its deep ocean course until it crashed?
Oh yes just posted something similar, I didn't see this post first.
Indeed the same thing I was thinking of, I wonder if this seafloor mapping thing will eventually discover the plane. Though perhaps the resolution is not adequate?
Edit: Someone (actual username :) ) just posted above that the grid cells are between 100x100m and 800x800m so that does indeed not sound adequate to detect a 777 accurately, sadly. The whole thing would easily fit into one grid cell of the smallest dimension.
Depth range Grid cell size % of world ocean floor
0– 1500 m 100 × 100 m 13.7
1500– 3000 m 200 × 200 m 11
3000– 5750 m 400 × 400 m 72.6
5750–11000 m 800 × 800 m 2.7
I think readers would be surprised to find out how poorly some regions of the Caribbean or Africa are charted. It's common for source data to be from the 1950s, for some ports I have seen tidal harmonics that were first recorded on rolls of paper. Charts of the arctic still relying on data from Cook(at least it doesn't change much thanks to it being rocky...)
I doubt many will shed a tear for the super yacht owners of the world but with their desire to go to ever more exotic locations they have highlighted how poor our data is for some parts of the world.
It may be that the aquifer in Devil's Hole is somehow connected to a network of underwater aquifers thousands of miles away in Mexico… but we just don't know, and have no way of knowing right now.
It's certainly not underground water being compressed for hundreds of miles before arriving at Devils Hole, if only because underground water flow doesn't work that way.
Seiches happen even in swimming pools, as at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2JwUSD3x2s where the pool starts sloshing around from an earthquake about 200 miles away. They don't need to be connected to a larger water system.
> The pool has frequently experienced activity due to far away earthquakes in Japan, Indonesia, Mexico, and Chile, which have been likened to extremely small scale tsunamis
I read somewhere E. O. Wilson stating that were he to start over again he would go into research of life in the soil. He also said there is so little we understand about the things just beneath our feet.
We don't even know how to document it all when we extract DNA from soil. You might be able to put things into general families of species but too much is uncharacterized. Some research is opting to just consider things in terms of ecological niches occupied instead of absolute species found.
Miracle Max: Look, I'm retired. And besides, why would you want someone the King's stinking son fired? I might kill whoever you wanted me to miracle.
Inigo: He's already dead.
Miracle Max: He is, huh? I'll take a look. Bring him in.
We screw up everything. The question is, can we leave places alone and screw up others instead? Screwing up the moon is probably better than screwing up Yosemite, or the Great Barrier Reef.
Nautical charts incorporate the latest (usually) data from each area, but it's eye opening to realize that in many areas the most recent data is actually centuries old.
That sort of makes sense. Not only are we naturally positioned above the moon, looking down on it, but it’s also not covered in a 5000m thick layer of dilute whale effluent.
The far side of the Moon is the lunar hemisphere that always faces away from Earth, opposite to the near side, because of synchronous rotation in the moon's orbit. ... The hemisphere is sometimes called the "dark side of the Moon", where "dark" means "unknown" instead of "lacking sunlight"
While you're not wrong, the grandparent comment said that most of the "dark side" is not fully mapped, implying—at least to in reading of it—that the reason it's not mapped is due to it being the "dark side".
In reality though, our maps of the far side of the moon are as good as those on the near side.
If you re-read the quoted bit it addresses this "dark side" vs "far side":
> The hemisphere is sometimes called the "dark side of the Moon", where "dark" means "unknown" instead of "lacking sunlight"
[ed note: compare "dark ages"]
So the "unknown" (relatively anyway) side of the moon is less mapped, but not because it's unlit, but because it's dark. The lit side of the moon is well mapped, not because it's always lit - sometimes it's unlit, but it's certainly the known bit as we've been looking at it since before we were human.
> The hemisphere is sometimes called the "dark side of the Moon", where "dark" means "unknown" instead of "lacking sunlight"
Tbqh I think "dark side of the moon" is more often a genuine misconception than a poetic way of saying unknown. Fundamental misconceptions of the Moon abound, such as the mistaken belief that the Moon is opposite of the sun and rises when the Sun sets. You'd think that people would notice the Moon in the sky during the day for much of the month, but some people just don't pay attention to the sky, don't think about it much, and pick up the meme of the antisolar synchronous moon from cartoons, video games and grandfather clocks.
And sometimes people simply mispeak, perhaps due to Pink Floyd.
I remember when Google added seafloors to maps they made a plea to fund more complete mapping. I can't find it now but if someone else knows where it is then it would be interesting to look back at 10 years ago and see how far we've come.
This is an impressive accomplishment. Not that we'll get to find out in a timely manner but I am curious how these maps compare to bathymetric surveys in the classified submarine world.
Yes, I hear "undersea mapping" and I go to "a high speed run" in my head from "The Hunt for Red October". Funny how commercial or even free catches up with military applications.
On one hand, discovery is the human way. On the other hand just like the USGS before, this is the first step to mining and other exploitation. Don't get me wrong, I went to the Colorado School of Mines so I know intimately how critical mining is to our modern civilization.
I guess what I'm hoping to highlight is the various world views. Some folks when they see this headline will say "great, now we can further explore, understand, and protect it" and some folks will say "great, now how do we mine or otherwise extract thr value just sitting on the sea floor for my and my friends profit".
I'm not trying to pass judgement on either, just highlight the duality of our modern life. We seek to protect and preserve on one hand and on the other hand we don't. Somehow we need to get our hands both working on the same thing.
Maybe it will lead to treating the oceans as more of an actively managed resource. So that's one possibly positive thing that could partially offset the inevitable negatives.
Personally, I'm also really interested in learning more about human prehistory because much of it was coastal and now submerged.
If I'm understanding their FAQ correctly (https://seabed2030.org/faq), no: the resolution is too low (400m × 400m at the depth the MH370 is thought to be).
I figured it would be much, much higher. I wonder if militaries have more mapped but consider it secret. That is also mostly shallower areas (for submarine evasion and detection).
> I wonder if militaries have more mapped but consider it secret.
Almost certainly, although I expect they focus a lot more on some areas than others. And they probably care about the deepest parts of the ocean floor less than the rest; if the ocean is so deep that it crushes anything short of a bathysphere, then it's probably less important to have precise maps of the ocean floor in those areas.
If you find this interesting, there's a very long, very good episode of the Omega Tau podcast about how seafloor mapping is done in practice. The host goes aboard the HMS Enterprise - a Royal Navy survey ship - and interviews a bunch of different officers and crewmen about the process.
I was hoping this was somehow mapped in real-time to follow movements of ocean life. Is there any efforts to doing so, if it's even a reasonable endeavour?
I personally think it'd be a worthwhile thing to do - but maybe will take such a massive amount of resources that we'll have to solve more pressing issues and stabilize society first before we'll - with precision - manage the ocean as a food source?
If it's possible to peek under the ocean in realtime to any significant degree, I reckon it would be the single most sensitive government secret: it would enable tracking nuclear submarines.
Whales are loud with their communication, so I could see that easily being possible - especially as pods and even specific whales apparently have unique voices.
The reason is that most of it is deep enough that mapping it for most commercial and recreational use does not matter. Thus the focus is mostly in shallow areas where there are risks or accessing it is possible.
Heaven oh mighty, I just wanted something web based to take a peak not to download 5Gb of data :D. Few resolution layers, real time like google map, there are public domain algorithms now, should not be difficult to setup and they could put something like wiki. (support me button)
The data probably sits on a few hundred hard drives in a data center. To make it available to the public, they would need to move the data to a client-facing server, then set up a platform to allow the public to navigate through the data. It's not an easy undertaking.
I'm less certain on the payment part, but having a very accurate bathymetric survey of the entire path is important for inter-continental submarine fiber optic cable laying. The cable ship needs to know precisely what speed to maintain at every point in the path and how rapidly to pay out the cable for it to not lay taut across underwater valleys, and to conform to the shape of the bottom.
Sure: highly profitable for the sponsor's management.
The Nippon Foundation is the charitable arm of Japan's boat racing gambling monopoly. One of only five types of legal gambling they have a large and profitable monopoly in exchange for charitable work like this.
The management and advertisers in turn make the profit. They just built a giant and super expensive HQ skyscraper in the Roppongi area.
They also sponsor various suicide help lines and subsidize wheel chair enabled vans.
