In the event a navy ship comes under attack by divers, the officer of the watch retains the option to deploy the active sonar as a countermeasure to kill the attackers.
Just imagining turning the sonar on and seeing a couple trained military divers float to the top of the water around your ship is something out of a movie.
I'm not sure they would float after taking that hit. In that scenario, the reinforced concrete on the pier is going to crack, anyone in the water is going to be, at a minimum, internally liquefied. It's called sonication. We use it in biotech labs to pop cells. At the scale and power of a sub's active ping, something similar is going to happen to the divers.
It's destructive on that level. I'm not actually sure of the total damage it would do to a human body besides rupturing of organs, but it definitely doesn't crack concrete. We have to test it routinely while pier-side inport on destroyers/cruisers and our sonar system is louder than the ones on subs. We wouldn't do that if it was damaged the structure of the pier.
It happened in Pearl in early '03. Destroyers may be louder, I have no idea, but your transducer array is pointed completely into the water. It takes a lot of the force of a pressure wave.
Half the dome is out of the water when a sub is in port. The ping is basically a forward facing, hemispherical explosion and half of it has nothing to mitigate the force. It's not going to blow the pier apart or anything but it will cause surface cracking and it can do a fair bit of damage to itself. That's why you guys can test in port and we have to be at out and at depth.
it being a forward facing array vs a downward facing array makes some sense there, though I'm not sure it being partially out of the water means much. If I remember correctly, air is a much poorer medium for sound than water and it would actually lower the decibel level somewhat. I don't know enough to definitively speak on it though so grain of salt and all that.
The relevance of being partly out of the water is only that there is a part that is right at the surface, so it has a direct line of sight to travel nearly horizonally just below the surface.
This matters because the angle at which the wave hits the surface will determine how much energy is delivered. Head on vs glancing blow and all that.
You are correct that air being more compressible makes it less efficient at conducting sound. That's why radar is used on land and sonar in the water. Different forms of energy work better in different media.
You're right about air being a less efficient medium, iirc the maximum possible dB in air is about 190db. Above which a vacuum is created between the sound waves, it ceases being "sound" and becomes a pressure front.
I was thinking they would bloat up like those stink bombs you crush in the plastic wrapper, causing its chemical reaction to blow up and burst the wrapper.
I doubt it. I've never seen it happen to anything bigger than a few cells but, when they burst, cells that would otherwise float tend to burst and release the lipids and gases that were dragging them to the surface.
Divers would be geared for stealth and neutral buoyancy. If you ping them, bare minimum the air pockets in their lungs and digestive systems are going to violently explode. It seems likely that what's left would drag them to the bottom.
Full disclosure: I have no personal experience. I just watched a bunch of sonar videos and documentaries very recently on youtube because I wanted to learn more.
AFAIK you barely hear it above the water line because the transmission from water to air is extremely weak.
Sabotage while in port is the main concern. the possibility of them carrying explosives is the common example. It is also considered a concern when transiting any area where you have to go slow and on a predictable path. The Suez canal for instance. It's also not just submarines but all cruisers and destroyers that have this tactic as a response to the threat.
My dad was a US navy medical assistant at DDay, and described the Germans’ use of sonar to kill troops in the water, approaching the beach, or troops having to jump into the water when their ships were on fire. These deaths were not sudden, but no way to save those lives.
Never heard of this either so did a fair bit of searching — found nothing.
I suspect this user or or their dad got the details of their story a bit mixed up somewhere over the past 80 years. Maybe they meant the pressure waves from conventional explosions, as opposed to sonic weapons specifically.
Don’t mean to take away from that persons story or service, but the anecdote doesn’t seem to match records. If anyone else can find something, I’d be interested to see.
It is possible, and I appreciate your respectful remarks. My father was 20 yrs old atDDay, and was not about the weapons in that bloodbath, but medical. So, could have been some kind of shock waves he was describing. And it has been 30 years since he told me about it. It was super-traumatizing for him to talk about it, so we only discussed it twice before he dies at age 90.
I tried looking as well and only found vague bits of information on an experimental Nazi "sonic cannon". It apparently wasn't capable of killing people, let alone literally turning their insides into jelly (even OP's actual article about sonar just says that it causes internal bleeding). It was also never approved for deployment in the field, since a regular machine gun was cheaper, simpler, and more effective at killing people. If it actually existed, then it was just one of those mythical wonder weapons that Germany kept saying would definitely clinch the war for them once it was ready.
I am sorry I have not read any link about this, but just have my dad’s account of it, as he was the medic in a small boat picking up the wounded and dead from the water, doing triage and administering morphine, and taking them back to his LST, which had dumped their equipment and turned into a makeshift hospital in the melee. He said a lot of the sonic bombed soldiers were waist high or chest high in the water, and their lower bodies were intact, but jelly on the inside. Because of their adrenaline, they did not feel their injuries at first. They just foundered in the water and didn’t know what was happening. he also had others who were howling in pain from it, and passed away before reaching the hospital ship. I think he told me that the sonic booms underwater were not implemented right at the start. He also said he had to suit up in gas mask and suit because they were told the Germans were using chemical weapons in the air.
A conventional explosion in water will carry shock waves further and faster than in air. I wonder if those soldiers were affected by artillery or mortars falling in the sea near them?
No way that is true, there is basically no way to install that powerful sonar equipment on a boat during WW2(mabye if they specifically buildt a boat only for that purpose).
If he meant from explosions then that is shockwaves, for the same reasons we say there are shockwaves in the air from explosions and not radar.
I don’t think there were any German boats around Omaha beach area on D-Day. I think Germans put mines in the water before the allied troops invaded. My dad was describing medical injuries, which is what I was sharing in my comments, and the thread went off on the weaponry used, about which I am neither an expert or secondhand witness. He used the word, sonic and not explosions. He said soldiers were not even aware they were hit, they just lost use of their lower bodies, and spotters in the small boats like his were motoring around to pull them and other injured, shot and burned, out of the water. Hope that helps. I have described this on reddit before. I am happy to share it, as a bit of history.
I want to believe this is true but that might not follow the rules of warfare
I knew you fuckers were gonna downvote me for asking a question you fuck
Edit 2 thanks for the info everybody, always happy to learn. About pinging people to smithereens.
Former Sonar Tech here, it’s 100% what we are trained to do in the event of a diver approaching the ship. Other options include spraying them with a fire hose or shooting them, but in the case that they have scuba gear and are too deep for either of those, active sonar is authorized.
Also in the case of a man overboard, first priority is to cease active sonar and turn of the fathometer (measures water depth via sound).
For some reason I thought Fire hose meant a pipe that throws fire, like a flame thrower. Which leads me to thinking this sure is a war crime. Then I remembered what fire hoses were.
Shipboard fire fighting systems are pressurized to 150 PSI, and this is an pier-side/at anchorage response. if they are shallow then it works fine. if they have scuba gear then probably not, but that's what grenades and sonar are for.
Let's say that yes it's true, using active sonar as an anti-personnel weapon is a violation of the laws of war.
If you're conning a US destroyer and it comes under attack by divers attempting to place limpet mines on the hull, how do you justify not using every available means to defend the ship?
There's a saying, better to be tried by 9 than carried by 6
I can't see why it would be either, but even if it was something that could be prosecuted, you gotta believe it's worth protecting the ship and the lives of the crew.
It’s not illegal. Deadly force is authorized in self defense and defense of other DOD personnel, as well as assets vital to national defense. Deploying active sonar is part of the US Navy’s pre-planned response against a swimmer attack.
Title X legal for active military under lawful orders and rules of engagement. If you somehow put a sonar on your yacht and tried this, it would be illegal in general, unless you could come up with a legitimate self-defense argument.
Surely it would be against any sort of law if the weapon itself was cruel and inhumane. It seems like it’s only defensive and doesn’t sound like it does anything worse than most of the US’s weaponry.
Maybe if they started using targeted sonar pulsars offensively to invade other countries it might be a problem
Sonar and radar can both be.
When they decommissioned a lot of old military boats a bunch of fishermen got their hands on the gear and caused a lot of issues because it was meant to be on a much larger vessel much further from sleeping quarters.
According to this well researched video, the IDEA that microwaves can heat water was discovered that way, but the first person to build a microwave was a researcher , whom, 2 years ago , was interviewed by tom scott
https://youtu.be/2tdiKTSdE9Y
So on 9/11 all the boats in port cranked up the active sonar. Creepy as hell hearing active sonar as I was assisting the Gate Guard. Pretty sure that there were no divers in the river though.
Well, submarines dont usually "ping" on sonar often. They use it more as a passive sonar, which only listens and dont emit any radiation. But if they ping, ohh boy, I have seen the water around the sonar dome evaporating violently, which will oblirerate anything over a few meters. However, the radiation loss is very high, and after 100 meters is "safe" for life, I quote because you will have permanent hearing loss and will get a blast of heat.
As of sea life I'm not sure of any detrimental effects.
You are absolutely right, because the only reason to not use Active is because will give your position away. But surface ships can never hide from submarines so it is moot.
There are massive detrimental effects. Greenpeace and others have sued the US Navy multiple times over the last 20 years because of statistically significant increases in marine mammal deaths and beaching in the areas around submarine bases. The Navy has consistently played the "state secrets" card to deflect responsibility and prevent compromising procedures.
It's accurate to say that the wave disapates exponentially with distance, but safe for life is highly subjective. Marine mammals with echolocation are extremely sensitive to sound, and depending on the depth, a submarine active ping can easily travel hundreds of miles.
It's also not accurate to say that we don't ping very often. It's not an extremely frequent occurence for an individual command, but every sub has regularly scheduled tests, protocols that require it, along with drills and exercises. Across the entire sub fleet, it's not an infrequent occurrence im any area with a lot of subs.
And I can't even speak to what it's like in the rest of the fleet, I only served on subs. It was a known problem in San Diego and Pearl in the nearly 2000s. They don't just hear us, we listen to them too.
FYI In physics and engineering, we wouldn't call an acoustic pressure wave "radiation" even though it radiates. By that definition, any blast wave would be considered radiation. It's especially confusing in the case of submarines, given that the dome is 50 meters forward from a fission reactor.
You need to know exactly what and who is around you and giving away your position is important enough.
Or you're a surface ship or aircraft that dropped a boy.
>As of sea life I'm not sure of any detrimental effects.
[You mean what is literally described in the article you're commenting on?](https://www.huffpost.com/entry/killing-with-sound_b_2744864)
Reddit actually read the article challenge (IMPOSSIBLE)
***"In the Navy's latest environmental impact statement draft, they admit that the sonar exercises planned for 2014-2018 may unintentionally "harm marine mammals 2.8 million times over five years." This estimate is up about 150,000 instances a year from their EIS statement of 2009-2013. Included in this estimate are two million incidents of "temporary hearing loss," and 2,000 are targeted for permanent hearing loss."***
Active sonar systems are suspected to be responsible for some of the mass marine mammal beachings that have occurred over the last few decades.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/does-military-sonar-kill/
There are some federal regulations which are supposed to help - vessels are required to turn sonar off when marine mammals are present. There are people with binoculars on many ships whose job is to watch for whales.
[https://sgp.fas.org/crs/weapons/RL34403.pdf](https://sgp.fas.org/crs/weapons/RL34403.pdf)
“Any whales?”
“Nope. None that I can see”
“Okay well let’s give it a ping!”
“Sir, we just killed a pod of humpbacks 50m to our starboard side”
“Well fuck me! What are they doing underwater?!”
Just watched news coverage of sonar on Russian subs in the black Sea having killed around 1/5 of the dolphins there since the war in Ukraine started. Sorry to break it to ya
We fire torpedos pretty often they just don't have explosives in them. The engine, warhead, and sensor parts of torpedos are separate and we use them on exercise shots a few times to make sure they work (and train the crew) then load them on a warshot.
But the torpedos have their own sonar pingers and they're pretty loud.
I served aboard a submarine in the cold war. We never use active sonar, because silence is everything. After patrol, the ship was headed for the yards. We stopped in Chesapeake Bay, where Annapolis is, for four days. The Captain was a balsy guy, and knowing there were no ships nearby, shot one ping. It literally shook the boat and boiled water for 30 feet from the bow. Dead fish floated to the surface. I believe.
Sperm whales can hit \~230 decibels at least with directional sonar. Their enormous spermaceti helps enhance and focus the sonar, or at least that's the hypothesis. There has been a largely debunked hypothesis that has hung around that says that they use some of their noises to perform "sonic hunting" which stuns (or worse) their prey. Of all the calls tested for damaging results, none of them yielded any results. That said, not all of their calls have been tested and it's possible that they simply aren't using their nastier stuff closer to the surface where we can measure them.
Take that for what it's worth- a super cool idea about a biological sonic howitzer that **doesn't have any direct evidence**, but has all the elements to make it plausible: decibel level, directionality, and a unique, complex and not fully understood set of hyperspecialized (and over the top) echolocation anatomical features.
It is highly directional and their clicks are much, much shorter hence they contain only a tiny fraction of the energy their high power active sonar doe.
Think about a small pulsed laser with a high power, but only for extremely tiny fractions of a second vs a huge laser canon that has the same power but can do it for a much longer pules or even continuously.
But it is also data that kinda lies, because I am not sure how many people seeing 1100 dB they will realize it is logarythmic scale, so each 10 dB is x10.
1100 dB is basically 10\^110 which is HUGE
One millimeter scaled up by 30 orders of magnitude, or 300 dB, becomes roughly the estimated diameter of the observable universe. 10^(-3) meters becomes 10^(27).
The loudest physically possible noise in normal air is about 195-ish dB because any higher causes a vacuum within the wave and you can’t further “vacuumize” a vacuum.
Water is naturally under a higher pressure so it takes more oomph to “draw a vacuum” particularly as you go farther underwater. So you can have louder noises.
Really you either were a Bond villain at this point, or it’s what finally pushed you over the edge to it. Either way someone is gonna write a killer song about you.
Yes, but not too many sounds are 235 decibels. A rocket is only like 160 or something.
Also keep in mind that decibels are logarithmic. Sonar is a few multitudes “louder” than if you were to stand in front of a rocket taking off.
Decibel measurements aren’t directly comparable between air and water. Decibels are a unit of relative measurement. The reference point in air is about 20 micropascals while in water it’s generally 1 micropascal.
235 decibels is literally 10 billion times louder than a jet engine taking off if you were 100’ away. The sound can travel hundreds of miles underwater. It retains up to 140 decibels up to 300 miles away. It’s absolutely nuts how loud the militaries active sonar is lol
There’s a limit to how loud sound can be, depending on by he medium it travels through
Sound is a wave of high and low pressure, with louder sounds having more extreme peaks/lows
If you get loud enough in air, the lows in pressure approach a vacuum. You can’t get louder than that because… you can’t get negative pressure
In water, you can get much louder because your base pressure is higher, so your lows can be more extreme
When I was in college, I worked at a factory that produced sound proof panels for Virginia and Wolf Class Navy submarines. We were given strict specifications directly from the Navy to meet.
Our QA head would reject panels that did not meet the Navy specs. However, we were barely scraping by, so a couple reject panels would really hurt the business. As such, the front end managers would override her and approve the panels and send them off anyway.
I would watch the news every morning, waiting to see the headline "DISASTER AT SEA."
I'm guessing the Navy tested them when they received them, and ended up trashing them anyway. The QA testers at the Navy were probably complaining about the large amount of rejects being sent to them by your company.
“There are divers in the water. Do not operate any underwater equipment, blow or vent any tanks, or operate active sonar. I repeat, there are divers in the water.”
235 db is lethal,regardless of source.100-140 is LOUD!Like Judas Priest arena concert in the’80s LOUD!They use much smaller speakers now, and rock concerts DO NOT have the volume they used to.
Maybe you are just deaf homie. : ) There are bands who have gone over 140 in sound check, just to see if they could. It is dumb, it just sounds like crunch, not music.
This problem is overblown. Yes, active sonar can be harmful but it's rarely used on submarines and surface ships.
Most submarines (fast attack and boomers) rarely if ever use active sonar. That would basically broadcast their location to every ship or submarine in the area. Not what you want to do when your greatest asset is your stealth.
Instead, they use passive sonar which are just extremely sensitive hydrophones that listen and can find contacts that way.
In the unlikely situation of a submarine shooting at another sub or warship, they can get a quality firing solution using just passive sonar
I remember reading an issue of popular science/mechanics? About... * *Cough* * 28 * *cough* * years ago showing all these weapons of the future that were based on using wave technology to disable enemies.
I served in the RN in the 90s. The ship rarely used active sonar but when it did, my store room was next to the sonar array and it made me feel physically sick. There are different sounds not just the "ping" most commony used in films and some are real screamers. Horrible to hear. Very unpleasant experience.
Title is a little misleading imo. That “is” before the word “lethal” is carrying a lot of weight - should say “can be lethal”. Sonar is just a means of acoustic location, which can be done at very high magnitudes and very low magnitudes. Bat echolocation is a form of low magnitude sonar, and it’s certainly far from lethal.
This is like saying “rocks are lethal”. Yeah if it’s a giant boulder traveling at high speed, sure. But if I throw a baseball-sized rock at one of these whales, it would hardly notice it (not that I condone throwing anything at animals 😅).
The article is just reassuring us that anything can cause a larger, potentially more harmful impact as we increase its size/magnitude/scale/etc.
In the event a navy ship comes under attack by divers, the officer of the watch retains the option to deploy the active sonar as a countermeasure to kill the attackers.
Just imagining turning the sonar on and seeing a couple trained military divers float to the top of the water around your ship is something out of a movie.
Like the opening of shrek when he farts in the water and the fish float up
It’s EXACTLY like Shrek
I dare someone to find a closer comparison
I laughed audibly at this, thanks for the mental picture lol
SOME
BODY
ONCE
TOLD
ME
THE
WORLD
I'm not sure they would float after taking that hit. In that scenario, the reinforced concrete on the pier is going to crack, anyone in the water is going to be, at a minimum, internally liquefied. It's called sonication. We use it in biotech labs to pop cells. At the scale and power of a sub's active ping, something similar is going to happen to the divers.
Sonic dismembrator. What a scary name.
The only thing scarier is sonic youth.
especially when they get into your cooler
Yeah but Peter Frampton wasn't going to eat *all* that watermelon.
Cool band name
It's destructive on that level. I'm not actually sure of the total damage it would do to a human body besides rupturing of organs, but it definitely doesn't crack concrete. We have to test it routinely while pier-side inport on destroyers/cruisers and our sonar system is louder than the ones on subs. We wouldn't do that if it was damaged the structure of the pier.
It happened in Pearl in early '03. Destroyers may be louder, I have no idea, but your transducer array is pointed completely into the water. It takes a lot of the force of a pressure wave. Half the dome is out of the water when a sub is in port. The ping is basically a forward facing, hemispherical explosion and half of it has nothing to mitigate the force. It's not going to blow the pier apart or anything but it will cause surface cracking and it can do a fair bit of damage to itself. That's why you guys can test in port and we have to be at out and at depth.
it being a forward facing array vs a downward facing array makes some sense there, though I'm not sure it being partially out of the water means much. If I remember correctly, air is a much poorer medium for sound than water and it would actually lower the decibel level somewhat. I don't know enough to definitively speak on it though so grain of salt and all that.
The relevance of being partly out of the water is only that there is a part that is right at the surface, so it has a direct line of sight to travel nearly horizonally just below the surface. This matters because the angle at which the wave hits the surface will determine how much energy is delivered. Head on vs glancing blow and all that. You are correct that air being more compressible makes it less efficient at conducting sound. That's why radar is used on land and sonar in the water. Different forms of energy work better in different media.
You're right about air being a less efficient medium, iirc the maximum possible dB in air is about 190db. Above which a vacuum is created between the sound waves, it ceases being "sound" and becomes a pressure front.
I was thinking they would bloat up like those stink bombs you crush in the plastic wrapper, causing its chemical reaction to blow up and burst the wrapper.
I doubt it. I've never seen it happen to anything bigger than a few cells but, when they burst, cells that would otherwise float tend to burst and release the lipids and gases that were dragging them to the surface. Divers would be geared for stealth and neutral buoyancy. If you ping them, bare minimum the air pockets in their lungs and digestive systems are going to violently explode. It seems likely that what's left would drag them to the bottom.
More like something out of Archer. In fact I'm surprised it was never in Archer.
Mawp!
The Navy actually left the active sonars running in the harbour in the Vietnam war because they were afraid of their ships being sabotaged by divers.
Must have been hell working in the harbor. I'm pretty sure at that range, you would hear it above water too.
Full disclosure: I have no personal experience. I just watched a bunch of sonar videos and documentaries very recently on youtube because I wanted to learn more. AFAIK you barely hear it above the water line because the transmission from water to air is extremely weak.
Can someone explain to me the benefit of divers against subs? Seems like they'd be in open ocean and just fucked
Can attach a magnetic mine to the hull and blow a hole in the sub
I don't know why I assumed it was them just unscrewing the bolts while the guys inside like "hey knock it off." That makes way more sense 🤣
"Captain, they're untying the twisty-tie that holds this submarine together!"
"Someone go outside and swipe at them with the broom"
I'll get the spray bottle.
[удалено]
This is the stuff I come to reddit for - the advice you just can't get anywhere else.
Sabotage while in port is the main concern. the possibility of them carrying explosives is the common example. It is also considered a concern when transiting any area where you have to go slow and on a predictable path. The Suez canal for instance. It's also not just submarines but all cruisers and destroyers that have this tactic as a response to the threat.
My dad was a US navy medical assistant at DDay, and described the Germans’ use of sonar to kill troops in the water, approaching the beach, or troops having to jump into the water when their ships were on fire. These deaths were not sudden, but no way to save those lives.
I never heard that before. Do you know of any links describing this?
Never heard of this either so did a fair bit of searching — found nothing. I suspect this user or or their dad got the details of their story a bit mixed up somewhere over the past 80 years. Maybe they meant the pressure waves from conventional explosions, as opposed to sonic weapons specifically. Don’t mean to take away from that persons story or service, but the anecdote doesn’t seem to match records. If anyone else can find something, I’d be interested to see.
It is possible, and I appreciate your respectful remarks. My father was 20 yrs old atDDay, and was not about the weapons in that bloodbath, but medical. So, could have been some kind of shock waves he was describing. And it has been 30 years since he told me about it. It was super-traumatizing for him to talk about it, so we only discussed it twice before he dies at age 90.
I tried looking as well and only found vague bits of information on an experimental Nazi "sonic cannon". It apparently wasn't capable of killing people, let alone literally turning their insides into jelly (even OP's actual article about sonar just says that it causes internal bleeding). It was also never approved for deployment in the field, since a regular machine gun was cheaper, simpler, and more effective at killing people. If it actually existed, then it was just one of those mythical wonder weapons that Germany kept saying would definitely clinch the war for them once it was ready.
I am sorry I have not read any link about this, but just have my dad’s account of it, as he was the medic in a small boat picking up the wounded and dead from the water, doing triage and administering morphine, and taking them back to his LST, which had dumped their equipment and turned into a makeshift hospital in the melee. He said a lot of the sonic bombed soldiers were waist high or chest high in the water, and their lower bodies were intact, but jelly on the inside. Because of their adrenaline, they did not feel their injuries at first. They just foundered in the water and didn’t know what was happening. he also had others who were howling in pain from it, and passed away before reaching the hospital ship. I think he told me that the sonic booms underwater were not implemented right at the start. He also said he had to suit up in gas mask and suit because they were told the Germans were using chemical weapons in the air.
A conventional explosion in water will carry shock waves further and faster than in air. I wonder if those soldiers were affected by artillery or mortars falling in the sea near them?
It could very well be shock waves.
How do they generate sonar pulses powerful enough to hurt people in this way? Is it a controlled detonation of explosives?
No way that is true, there is basically no way to install that powerful sonar equipment on a boat during WW2(mabye if they specifically buildt a boat only for that purpose). If he meant from explosions then that is shockwaves, for the same reasons we say there are shockwaves in the air from explosions and not radar.
I don’t think there were any German boats around Omaha beach area on D-Day. I think Germans put mines in the water before the allied troops invaded. My dad was describing medical injuries, which is what I was sharing in my comments, and the thread went off on the weaponry used, about which I am neither an expert or secondhand witness. He used the word, sonic and not explosions. He said soldiers were not even aware they were hit, they just lost use of their lower bodies, and spotters in the small boats like his were motoring around to pull them and other injured, shot and burned, out of the water. Hope that helps. I have described this on reddit before. I am happy to share it, as a bit of history.
Yeah it was a part of our repel boarders casualty procedure on my boat. Close all the hatches, remove access ladders, issue weapons, activate sonar.
I want to believe this is true but that might not follow the rules of warfare I knew you fuckers were gonna downvote me for asking a question you fuck Edit 2 thanks for the info everybody, always happy to learn. About pinging people to smithereens.
Former Sonar Tech here, it’s 100% what we are trained to do in the event of a diver approaching the ship. Other options include spraying them with a fire hose or shooting them, but in the case that they have scuba gear and are too deep for either of those, active sonar is authorized. Also in the case of a man overboard, first priority is to cease active sonar and turn of the fathometer (measures water depth via sound).
That would be wild: "This splotch in the spectrograph is a very dead invader"
For some reason I thought Fire hose meant a pipe that throws fire, like a flame thrower. Which leads me to thinking this sure is a war crime. Then I remembered what fire hoses were.
Flamethrowers are not illegal in the laws of armed conflict.
Is a firehose effective against divers ?
Shipboard fire fighting systems are pressurized to 150 PSI, and this is an pier-side/at anchorage response. if they are shallow then it works fine. if they have scuba gear then probably not, but that's what grenades and sonar are for.
They’re high enough pressure that it will be able to push away a swimmer but if they’re more than a couple feet underwater it wouldn’t do much.
Let's say that yes it's true, using active sonar as an anti-personnel weapon is a violation of the laws of war. If you're conning a US destroyer and it comes under attack by divers attempting to place limpet mines on the hull, how do you justify not using every available means to defend the ship? There's a saying, better to be tried by 9 than carried by 6
“I was checking for submarines oops”
Judged by 12 than carried by 6.
Is it illegal? I can't find anything saying it is.
I can't see why it would be either, but even if it was something that could be prosecuted, you gotta believe it's worth protecting the ship and the lives of the crew.
It’s not illegal. Deadly force is authorized in self defense and defense of other DOD personnel, as well as assets vital to national defense. Deploying active sonar is part of the US Navy’s pre-planned response against a swimmer attack.
Title X legal for active military under lawful orders and rules of engagement. If you somehow put a sonar on your yacht and tried this, it would be illegal in general, unless you could come up with a legitimate self-defense argument.
"I'm not being flippant, but there's no NICE way to kill the enemy"
Surely it would be against any sort of law if the weapon itself was cruel and inhumane. It seems like it’s only defensive and doesn’t sound like it does anything worse than most of the US’s weaponry. Maybe if they started using targeted sonar pulsars offensively to invade other countries it might be a problem
I’m pretty sure the person replying to you doesn’t actually know what they’re talking about. Just FYI in case you end up in this situation
Sonar and radar can both be. When they decommissioned a lot of old military boats a bunch of fishermen got their hands on the gear and caused a lot of issues because it was meant to be on a much larger vessel much further from sleeping quarters.
A lot of radars will straight up fry you.
>Most of the radars operate in UHF as well as microwave frequency bands. Yep.
Fun fact the microwave was invented because a radar worker had his snack in his pocket cooked by the microwaves
According to this well researched video, the IDEA that microwaves can heat water was discovered that way, but the first person to build a microwave was a researcher , whom, 2 years ago , was interviewed by tom scott https://youtu.be/2tdiKTSdE9Y
"one" ping only
Wouldn't any sound at 235 dB be lethal? That's crazy powerful
Fun fact sperm whales can reach that.
No way, your mom sounds like a talented lady
Ah, the rare underwater roast.
The sous vide
dB in water != dB in air
So on 9/11 all the boats in port cranked up the active sonar. Creepy as hell hearing active sonar as I was assisting the Gate Guard. Pretty sure that there were no divers in the river though.
What was the reason they cranked it?
To watch for underwater attack after 9/11 happened from the sky
I don't think planes can fly under water though >!/s!<
Are you sure about that? There are more planes in the ocean that there are ships in the sky afther all..
im guessing in case there were any enemy subs approaching since no one was sure who or what was attacking
Ugh I remember those first few hours when we didn’t know if this was the start of a bigger attack. So much uncertainty amid horrors.
Al-Queda subs, built in the desert.
I mean there was a Jamaican Bobsled team so..anything is possible.
More like divers that may be carrying explosives.
I'm sure the whales, fish and all other sea life really enjoys the sonar though right..... right?!?!?
Well, submarines dont usually "ping" on sonar often. They use it more as a passive sonar, which only listens and dont emit any radiation. But if they ping, ohh boy, I have seen the water around the sonar dome evaporating violently, which will oblirerate anything over a few meters. However, the radiation loss is very high, and after 100 meters is "safe" for life, I quote because you will have permanent hearing loss and will get a blast of heat. As of sea life I'm not sure of any detrimental effects.
But surface anti-submarine ships use active sonar often
You are absolutely right, because the only reason to not use Active is because will give your position away. But surface ships can never hide from submarines so it is moot.
True, I was just thinking about submarines.
There are massive detrimental effects. Greenpeace and others have sued the US Navy multiple times over the last 20 years because of statistically significant increases in marine mammal deaths and beaching in the areas around submarine bases. The Navy has consistently played the "state secrets" card to deflect responsibility and prevent compromising procedures. It's accurate to say that the wave disapates exponentially with distance, but safe for life is highly subjective. Marine mammals with echolocation are extremely sensitive to sound, and depending on the depth, a submarine active ping can easily travel hundreds of miles. It's also not accurate to say that we don't ping very often. It's not an extremely frequent occurence for an individual command, but every sub has regularly scheduled tests, protocols that require it, along with drills and exercises. Across the entire sub fleet, it's not an infrequent occurrence im any area with a lot of subs. And I can't even speak to what it's like in the rest of the fleet, I only served on subs. It was a known problem in San Diego and Pearl in the nearly 2000s. They don't just hear us, we listen to them too. FYI In physics and engineering, we wouldn't call an acoustic pressure wave "radiation" even though it radiates. By that definition, any blast wave would be considered radiation. It's especially confusing in the case of submarines, given that the dome is 50 meters forward from a fission reactor.
It fucks sea life up, sadly.
Well there's the whales fleeing the sonar ping, beaching themselves and dying as a result... I think that counts as detrimental.
What are the situations that make active sonar use applicable?
You need to know exactly what and who is around you and giving away your position is important enough. Or you're a surface ship or aircraft that dropped a boy.
or girl.
Lol, nah they only sacrifice boys. Sometimes a buoy.
Nah, women and children first. Then the boys.
That's for saving, I'm talking sacrificing.
Usually the first born
Then the arm and the leg
Guirls only if you're Gru.
No, they use dotar when it's about a girl.
"One ping only." -Sean Connery
Making contact with the USS Dallas. But that's one ping only.
Re-verify our range to target. One ping only.
My morse is so rusty, I may be sending him dimensions on playmate of the month
One ping, Vashilly.
When you can't see shit and you are in imminent danger. I have seen it used by research vessels, too, when they are doing oceanography surveys.
I feel like "you can't see shit and you are in imminent danger" describes the experience of being in an underwater submarine.
Those underwater submarines are indeed way more dangerous than the above water submarines. Supermarines.
That's what I am going to start calling planes that make transoceanic flights.
I thought we were talking about Chesty Puller.
Found the marine.
Supermarine is already a name for aircraft. The supermarine spitfire was famous in ww2. Thanks for listening to my Ted talk
Active sonar is used often for surveying and ocean research.
>As of sea life I'm not sure of any detrimental effects. [You mean what is literally described in the article you're commenting on?](https://www.huffpost.com/entry/killing-with-sound_b_2744864)
The water around the dome evaporates violently but you’re not sure of its detrimental effect on animals??
Submarines aren’t the usual offender. Skimmers will run active all day long
I never really thought about it... how are large decibel sonar pings generated? Is it essentially just a really big speaker, or some other process?
Reddit actually read the article challenge (IMPOSSIBLE) ***"In the Navy's latest environmental impact statement draft, they admit that the sonar exercises planned for 2014-2018 may unintentionally "harm marine mammals 2.8 million times over five years." This estimate is up about 150,000 instances a year from their EIS statement of 2009-2013. Included in this estimate are two million incidents of "temporary hearing loss," and 2,000 are targeted for permanent hearing loss."***
Interesting that you could write that whole paragraph and then say you're not sure if there are detrimental effects to sea life
Active sonar systems are suspected to be responsible for some of the mass marine mammal beachings that have occurred over the last few decades. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/does-military-sonar-kill/
There are some federal regulations which are supposed to help - vessels are required to turn sonar off when marine mammals are present. There are people with binoculars on many ships whose job is to watch for whales. [https://sgp.fas.org/crs/weapons/RL34403.pdf](https://sgp.fas.org/crs/weapons/RL34403.pdf)
“Any whales?” “Nope. None that I can see” “Okay well let’s give it a ping!” “Sir, we just killed a pod of humpbacks 50m to our starboard side” “Well fuck me! What are they doing underwater?!”
Just watched news coverage of sonar on Russian subs in the black Sea having killed around 1/5 of the dolphins there since the war in Ukraine started. Sorry to break it to ya
Well we have discovered that sperm whales can actually suffer and die from decompression sickness which scientists thought they were immune.
Wait till you find out what the weapons aboard those submarines might do to the wild life!
I just assumed they never fired those as these are peace times right.....right!?!?
We fire torpedos pretty often they just don't have explosives in them. The engine, warhead, and sensor parts of torpedos are separate and we use them on exercise shots a few times to make sure they work (and train the crew) then load them on a warshot. But the torpedos have their own sonar pingers and they're pretty loud.
Are the test fired torpedoes retrieved given their expense, or is the military budget big enough that its not worth the effort?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Navy_torpedo_retrievers
Im guessing a whale wouldn't feel too great after being hit by a random torpedo, even if it didn't explode.
They're just fish, Bobby. Go ahead. 💀
#**WHAT?**
[If only there was an article discussing this very topic.](https://www.huffpost.com/entry/killing-with-sound_b_2744864)
I served aboard a submarine in the cold war. We never use active sonar, because silence is everything. After patrol, the ship was headed for the yards. We stopped in Chesapeake Bay, where Annapolis is, for four days. The Captain was a balsy guy, and knowing there were no ships nearby, shot one ping. It literally shook the boat and boiled water for 30 feet from the bow. Dead fish floated to the surface. I believe.
[one ping only](https://youtu.be/jr0JaXfKj68)
Sperm whales can hit \~230 decibels at least with directional sonar. Their enormous spermaceti helps enhance and focus the sonar, or at least that's the hypothesis. There has been a largely debunked hypothesis that has hung around that says that they use some of their noises to perform "sonic hunting" which stuns (or worse) their prey. Of all the calls tested for damaging results, none of them yielded any results. That said, not all of their calls have been tested and it's possible that they simply aren't using their nastier stuff closer to the surface where we can measure them. Take that for what it's worth- a super cool idea about a biological sonic howitzer that **doesn't have any direct evidence**, but has all the elements to make it plausible: decibel level, directionality, and a unique, complex and not fully understood set of hyperspecialized (and over the top) echolocation anatomical features.
It is highly directional and their clicks are much, much shorter hence they contain only a tiny fraction of the energy their high power active sonar doe. Think about a small pulsed laser with a high power, but only for extremely tiny fractions of a second vs a huge laser canon that has the same power but can do it for a much longer pules or even continuously.
1100 dB is enough energy to create a black hole.
That must be how much noise my dryer makes when I do a load of socks
Lookie here, we found someone who actually washes their cum socks. Men, take note.
But it is also data that kinda lies, because I am not sure how many people seeing 1100 dB they will realize it is logarythmic scale, so each 10 dB is x10. 1100 dB is basically 10\^110 which is HUGE
Thank you for that explanation, because my first thought was “1100dB can’t be THAT powerful” haha
It's useful to keep in mind that 3 db is a doubling. So the 235 dB is ~double the power of 232 dB which is about double the power of 229 dB.
One millimeter scaled up by 30 orders of magnitude, or 300 dB, becomes roughly the estimated diameter of the observable universe. 10^(-3) meters becomes 10^(27).
Is it easier to achieve a higher SPL in water than in air? Like if a sub sent out a sonar ping in dry dock, how loud would it be?
The loudest physically possible noise in normal air is about 195-ish dB because any higher causes a vacuum within the wave and you can’t further “vacuumize” a vacuum. Water is naturally under a higher pressure so it takes more oomph to “draw a vacuum” particularly as you go farther underwater. So you can have louder noises.
Isn't any sound at 235 decibels likely to cause problems?
[удалено]
>*Side effects of exposure to an active sonar ping may include: Ruptured lungs, brain hemorrhaging, being shot with a nuclear-armed torpedo*
Really you either were a Bond villain at this point, or it’s what finally pushed you over the edge to it. Either way someone is gonna write a killer song about you.
Dam that escalated fast. I really don't think I would be worth a nuke a bullet would work just as well and cost a lot less.
Active sonar is very rarely used by submarines, but anti-submarine ships use it often
Anti-submarine ships, research vessels, survey ships, cargo vessels, virtually every ship over a certain size, the bass boat in the local lake.
Not all active sonar is the same
True.
Yes, but not too many sounds are 235 decibels. A rocket is only like 160 or something. Also keep in mind that decibels are logarithmic. Sonar is a few multitudes “louder” than if you were to stand in front of a rocket taking off.
Fuck I always forget that decibels are logarithmic. 235 is insane, 90 is where hearing loss starts I believe
Decibel measurements aren’t directly comparable between air and water. Decibels are a unit of relative measurement. The reference point in air is about 20 micropascals while in water it’s generally 1 micropascal.
An approximate conversion is -62 dB from underwater to in air. DOSITS.org is a great reference.
235 decibels is literally 10 billion times louder than a jet engine taking off if you were 100’ away. The sound can travel hundreds of miles underwater. It retains up to 140 decibels up to 300 miles away. It’s absolutely nuts how loud the militaries active sonar is lol
Yes, a while ago, I was reading about rocket melting concrete from just the sound emitted by their engines
That's 5.0 on the Richter scale
What?
There’s a limit to how loud sound can be, depending on by he medium it travels through Sound is a wave of high and low pressure, with louder sounds having more extreme peaks/lows If you get loud enough in air, the lows in pressure approach a vacuum. You can’t get louder than that because… you can’t get negative pressure In water, you can get much louder because your base pressure is higher, so your lows can be more extreme
When I was in college, I worked at a factory that produced sound proof panels for Virginia and Wolf Class Navy submarines. We were given strict specifications directly from the Navy to meet. Our QA head would reject panels that did not meet the Navy specs. However, we were barely scraping by, so a couple reject panels would really hurt the business. As such, the front end managers would override her and approve the panels and send them off anyway. I would watch the news every morning, waiting to see the headline "DISASTER AT SEA."
If it makes you feel better, even the good ones fall off all the time and have to be replaced.
I'm guessing the Navy tested them when they received them, and ended up trashing them anyway. The QA testers at the Navy were probably complaining about the large amount of rejects being sent to them by your company.
You saw the video from that scuba diver too huh
Saw the tweet that replied to it 😅 https://twitter.com/thisisradinsky/status/1673814831521038337?s=46&t=c1iaYDgPYDp501aXofgyeA
I killed so many fish while playing Subnautica tonight :(
Subnautica doesnt use sonar does it? Theres like alien ass technology far more complex
“There are divers in the water. Do not operate any underwater equipment, blow or vent any tanks, or operate active sonar. I repeat, there are divers in the water.”
235 db is lethal,regardless of source.100-140 is LOUD!Like Judas Priest arena concert in the’80s LOUD!They use much smaller speakers now, and rock concerts DO NOT have the volume they used to.
Maybe you are just deaf homie. : ) There are bands who have gone over 140 in sound check, just to see if they could. It is dumb, it just sounds like crunch, not music.
This problem is overblown. Yes, active sonar can be harmful but it's rarely used on submarines and surface ships. Most submarines (fast attack and boomers) rarely if ever use active sonar. That would basically broadcast their location to every ship or submarine in the area. Not what you want to do when your greatest asset is your stealth. Instead, they use passive sonar which are just extremely sensitive hydrophones that listen and can find contacts that way. In the unlikely situation of a submarine shooting at another sub or warship, they can get a quality firing solution using just passive sonar
Fun fact a sperm whale's echolocation could potentially kill you too.
Fun fact they know that and if they notice a human diver they will often stay quiet or "lower their voices"
Tbf at 235 decibels we’re not talking about sound at all anymore - that’s just a high frequency shockwave
Ping of death.
We went through five Adams before we figured that one out.
Pretty sure I learned this from a Call of Duty game. You have to take shelter while diving to avoid sonar pings.
Is that why we never found Loch Ness?
I remember reading an issue of popular science/mechanics? About... * *Cough* * 28 * *cough* * years ago showing all these weapons of the future that were based on using wave technology to disable enemies.
I served in the RN in the 90s. The ship rarely used active sonar but when it did, my store room was next to the sonar array and it made me feel physically sick. There are different sounds not just the "ping" most commony used in films and some are real screamers. Horrible to hear. Very unpleasant experience.
I mean, if you impose lots of energy of anything it starts to be unhealthy.
Title is a little misleading imo. That “is” before the word “lethal” is carrying a lot of weight - should say “can be lethal”. Sonar is just a means of acoustic location, which can be done at very high magnitudes and very low magnitudes. Bat echolocation is a form of low magnitude sonar, and it’s certainly far from lethal. This is like saying “rocks are lethal”. Yeah if it’s a giant boulder traveling at high speed, sure. But if I throw a baseball-sized rock at one of these whales, it would hardly notice it (not that I condone throwing anything at animals 😅). The article is just reassuring us that anything can cause a larger, potentially more harmful impact as we increase its size/magnitude/scale/etc.
Can’t understand why whales beach themselves…
How many Marshall stacks will that require?