Sounds of the sea: Listening online to the ocean floor (US Navy not happy)

BBC ^ | Rhitu Chatterjee and Rob Hugh-Jones

[LibWhacker]

Satellite photos used to be for military eyes only, but Google Earth changed all that. Now something similar is happening to the ocean depths, with any web user able to listen in and "surf the sea floor" - and the US Navy is not happy.

"The cable is going underneath here," says Benoit Pirenne, standing at the water's edge on Canada's Vancouver Island. "It's going out 500 miles (800km) in a big loop in the ocean, coming back in the same place."

The Vancouver cable connects a network of scientific instruments on the floor of the north Pacific, some as deep as 1.5 miles (2.5km).

Set up by Pirenne and his colleagues at the University of Victoria, and called Neptune Canada, they continuously monitor the marine environment.

The scientists are harvesting large amounts of information, including water pressure readings that help them better understand the movement of tsunamis through oceans, which they hope will lead to more accurate warning systems.

But they are also listening.

Pressure-sensitive microphones pick up the live sounds of everything from whales and shipping to seismic activity and the movement of tectonic plates, and this audio is shared with scientists all over the world.

It's also now available to anyone else with an internet connection.

[jpsb]

maybe we should buy/build a super quiet sub like the Sweds do? Just a thought.

[Delta 21]

http://www.listentothedeep.com/

Pretty cool.

[FourPeas]

Allowing everyone to listen to that part of the ocean poses a threat to US national security, he says, because someone - he won't say who - might use that information to work out the type and location of US naval vessels.

To reduce that threat, the US and Canadian navies have struck a deal with the scientists that effectively allows them to censor the sound of naval operations.

"Rather than it being sent to the internet in real time, we divert it to a naval facility where the data are screened, and then returned as soon as possible to the University of Victoria," says Winokur.

As the article points out, this isn't a workable long-term solution. I think it was Hunter that postulated that in a world without secrets that there's so much data one can hide in all the noise.

[null and void]

And under sea drones that sound like big subs...

[unkus]

Very cool. Thanks!

[IncPen]

Something like this might eventually have to be abandoned due to constant maintenance issues, ie. if it keeps getting inexplicably cut...

[El Sordo]

Innerestin’

[Billthedrill]

They’re concerned about acoustic signatures, not realtime data. No one will be harmed if these are delayed enough to prevent correlation with specific units. I think the compromise is a good one. IMHO, of course.

[krogers58]

Perhaps the US Navy could “mask” their ships by having them emit fake sounds. I would think it would by just another arena of electronic warfare. By masking their ships, they could make it appear that they are a cruise liner or whatever they were interested in having someone else believe. It could be considered disinformation.

[Cvengr]

Now that the secret is out, we can release the datum on whale training.

Dolphin communications and porpoise mine placement were only prototype studies. Sharks with lasers mounted on their heads were test platforms.

The fleets of gray whales which have been trained to feed on Polaris missiles, swim into enemy waters on command, only to disgorge their nuclear payloads evades all detection by our adversaries.

Soon our abilities to maneuver swarms of NBC laden sardines will render the great depths ours once more!

BWAAHHAHHAHAHAHA!

[CodeToad]

The funny thing is that many highly classified programs are actually terrible at what they do. That is the reason they are classified; not because of what they can do but because of what they cannot do. This allows rumors and tall tales to help drive their success.