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I wonder if U.S. agencies (e.g. the Navy) had picked up the sound of the implosion days ago, back when the Titan was said to have lost communication, and knew all this time that the Titan had likely already been destroyed. But there's no incentive for them to publicly say anything, as it would hint to their underwater surveillance capabilities. And the "rescue effort" is good practice for their crews.

I watched most of the press conferences and don't think I heard anyone ask about it. But hearing loud noises across thousands of miles is certainly within the U.S. military's capability.

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This is exactly what happened to the argentinian sub in 2017

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearance_of_ARA_San_Juan

>On 23 November the Argentine Navy said an event consistent with an explosion had been detected, on the day the submarine lost communications, by CTBTO seismic anomaly listening posts on Ascension Island and Crozet Islands

>The organization had been asked to analyse data from the search area by the Argentine government on the week of the disappearance, but no leads had materialised until 22 November when the CTBTO informed the government.

>The Navy added that it received information on the explosion on the afternoon of 22 November, adding that it would have concentrated search efforts in that area had it known sooner.

From the WSJ: https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-navy-detected-titan-sub-imp...

https://archive.is/pSpem

U.S. Navy Detected Titan Sub Implosion Days Ago Underwater microphones designed to detect enemy submarines first detected Titan tragedy

WASHINGTON—A top secret U.S. Navy acoustic detection system designed to spot enemy submarines first heard the Titan sub implosion hours after the submersible began its mission, officials involved in the search said. The Navy began listening for the Titan almost as soon as the sub lost communications, according to a U.S. defense official. Shortly after its disappearance, the U.S. system detected what it suspected was the sound of an implosion near the debris site discovered Thursday and reported its findings to the commander on site, U.S. defense officials said. “The U.S. Navy conducted an analysis of acoustic data and detected an anomaly consistent with an implosion or explosion in the general vicinity of where the Titan submersible was operating when communications were lost,” a senior U.S. Navy official told The Wall Street Journal in a statement. “While not definitive, this information was immediately shared with the Incident Commander to assist with the ongoing search and rescue mission.”

Possibly, but arguing against that are three factors: 1) the sub was tiny and its possible it wasn't actually loud enough; 2) the sub was at a depth that SOSUS doesn't listen at and sound propagation underwater is very complex; and 3) there's a lot of other potential sources of noise underwater, including both mechanical like ships and biological. Even if they did detect the Titan's implosion, there's enough sources of doubt that three days ago it would've been difficult to say definitely that it was gone.

I'd imagine that location is the second most acoustically monitored part of the Atlantic (looking for ruskie subs coming from the north).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOSUS

What's the first?

I would guess the gap between Iceland and the U.K. for the same reason.

Yes

I assume it's: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIUK_gap

Would the implosion have been loud enough?

I mean the thing was a tiny 7x3m cylinder located 700Km from the nearest coast...

I've never been in the military, not a sub-mariner, 1000% SOSUS could detect that. SOSUS could detect that in the 1970s, if not earlier.

https://archive.is/pSpem

Sound can travel MUCH further and fast underwater, so in the event of an implosion, it might create enough of a spike in hydrophones that is statistically significant. Also the experts might be able to analyze the signal's signature to confirm (or bet) it's an implosion.

Crossmatch that with the time of loss of communication and it's safe to assume that it's it.

Indeed, and moreover, the ability to detect underwater sound is probably aided by the lack of localized turbulence (wind noise in microphones) and the degree of sophistication sought after by navies due to the detection and counter-detection of military submarines.

Without any actual knowledge, I imagine that a ship or sub could be festooned with hydrophones, enabling it to detect faint noises, but also to determine their direction from phase information.

I have no idea specifically how loud it would have been. However with some probably-reasonable guesses, it looks like it actually would have been quite loud.

Here's a naval study where they measured underwater sound propagation: https://www.navymarinespeciesmonitoring.us/files/7514/2780/4...

They found that a 10lb block of C4 exploding produced ~210db of underwater sound. If we use that sound level as an approximation of the implosion of 200 cubic meters of submersible, which seems not completely unreasonable, then we can use the inverse square law to calculate the perceived sound far away.

Halifax, NS is 1100km from the Titanic wreck. A sound that is 210db at 1 meter, is 89db at 1100000 meters. Boston is 1700km away; at that distance it would be 85db.

85db is really quite loud. You would be able to hear that, if you were underwater and paying attention.

If the implosion was instead, say, 180db, then it would have been 55db in Boston harbor. Still easily detectable by instruments.

For reference, when divers are performing construction using e.g. rock drills, those commonly reach 170db. The implosion of close to 200 cubic meters of air seems like it would produce a louder noise than a rock drill.

The sad part to ponder is most likely the team on the ship knew the sub was gone right when the communications was lost but kept the information to themselves.

Apparently they've "lost communications" in many of their other trips, which is why also hints at why they didn't raise the alarm for many hours.

From what I read and watched the company didn't take safety very seriously at all.

A former employee claims they were fired after brining up concerns about safety. The glass apparently was not rated for the depth required to see the titanic.

Which begs the question why there were no additional safety measures put in place after so many "skin of the teeth" trips making it back.

IMHO this was a get rich scheme the two founders spun up that went sideways. They spent the absolute minimum on safety and repeatedly cut corners on the sub in order to get it up and running, then charged people a ton of money to take a trip down deeper than the sub was clearly capable of going.

Look up "normalization of deviance".

Perversely, a bunch of near-disasters can reduce people's concern and make them less likely to demand fixes because "it did that last time too and everything turned out okay" is a powerful rationalization.

Yup.

Meanwhile, smart organizations have decades-ago stopped tracking (primarily) "Time-Lost Work Accidents" and replaced that with tracking "Close Calls".

I've seen prominent signs for "N Days Since a Time Lost Accident", and more recently "X Days Since a Close Call".

Sadly, it is so obvious that this CEO clown was doing everything possible to avoid experienced people ("not as inspiring to hire 50yo white guys as hiring young upstarts") so he could overrule any safety or redundancy concerns, firing people as soon as they raised things like "this porthole window is only rated to 1500m and we're going to 4000m", using cheap scrap scaffolding as ballast, and completely ignoring any kind of redundancy in case something went wrong. He seems to have gotten a just end, but his deceived customers didn't deserve that.

A good real-world example of the consequences of this normalization is British Airways flight 5390 [1]

  This problem extended far beyond this one individual, who was merely a symptom. The entire Birmingham maintenance facility, and perhaps British Airways more broadly, had a singular focus on “getting the job done.” If doing the work by the book took longer and jeopardized schedules, then doing the work by the book was discouraged. The shift manager who used the wrong bolts stated in an interview that if he sought out the instructions or used the official parts catalogue on every task, then he would never “get the job done,” as though this was a totally normal and reasonable attitude with which to approach aircraft maintenance. This attitude was in fact normalized on a high level by supervisors who rewarded the employees who most consistently kept planes on schedule. That a serious incident would result from such a culture was inevitable. The shift manager believed it to be reasonable to just “put on whatever bolts came off” and make a quick judgment call about what kind of bolts they were — not because he was personally deficient, but because he had been trained into a culture that didn’t consider this a flagrant safety violation.

[1] https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/the-near-crash-of-britis...

Very few industries are safe enough to actually capture the "That could have been bad" events, that's what ASRS https://asrs.arc.nasa.gov/ does for the Aviation industry (there are equivalent agencies in various other wealthy countries e.g. CHIRP in the UK)

In the absence of a proper means to report "That could have been bad" as you say it can cause normalization. But it's understandable that you don't implement something like ASRS when you haven't solved most of your "That was bad" problems. If you regularly have CI failures due to the code not even compiling, "We need more unit tests" isn't top of the list of your problems.

I mean the CEO of the company is one of the fatalities so it's not like he thought and understood the sub was dangerous but was still willing to sell tickets to other people. We thought what is was doing was safe (obviously he was wrong) but he did have skin in the game.

I honestly see the company as a startup in idea. They couldn't afford to build a proper deep sea sub so they used the idea of new tech in the form of carbon fiber (which I'm assuming is way cheaper to form vs a titanium hull) and billed this as next gen. Everything that I read almost fits in the idea of "fail fast".

yes I believe in one interview the CEO said carbon fiber provides buoyancy but is much cheaper than syntactic foam, which other similar such vessels have used

"losing communications" could be a broad misunderstanding of Pogue's comments

https://twitter.com/Pogue/status/1671524465736335366

"not completely unreasonable" does a lot of heavy lifting here. I have zero intuition how the sound of an under water explosion of c4 compares to an implosion.

Volume is more like a tenth of that, I think? Maybe interior dimensions 2 meters diameter and 5 meters length gives around 16 cubic meters if my math is sane (Religion major, so go easy on me if not).

my "orders of magnitude" alarm is going off here. There's no way that the implosion of a fairly small sub is going to be heard in Boston even if underwater. Something doesn't make sense here.

Sound does travel extremely well in water.

http://resource.npl.co.uk/acoustics/techguides/seaabsorption... -- here is a quick calculator for sound loss by distance. I think actual geography is important too but from understanding whether or not it's hypothetically possible, it certainly looks like it.

For example, at the default inputs we see .061 db/km absorption. This is at 1khz. Higher frequencies attenuated more and lower frequencies less.

I have no idea what frequencies an implosion generates, but given that, a sound at 120db might still be 60db 1000km later. Certainly seems possible and in fact given what we have seen from the US Navy (detecting imploding soviet subs in the middle of the pacific ocean) it seems totally possible to me that this small sub could be detected if microphones were places in quiet spots offshore of the continental US and Canada.

I think we don't have enough information to rule out that this was detectable.

Your calculations might be wrong. If the distance is 1000 km (1M meters), and inverse square law is correct, then the sound would become 1M*1M = 1T times more silent. 1M times smaller is 120 dB less, and 1T times smaller is 240 db less, so the amplitude of sound should be at 210 - 240 = -30dB less than threshold of hearing.

Also, I wonder, if sound of explosions propagate that well, can one install multiple sensors to detect and map source of gunfire and artillery positions in realtime? (I hope I haven't disclosed NATO military secrets here).

You just invented ShotSpotter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ShotSpotter

Navy sonar equipment can hear so much more than you would ever expect. Sound travels very well in water. The navy has software that pretty much tunes all of that out, similar to how radar ignores things under certain speeds as it's just not interesting to them. However, if they want, they can see/hear the raw data. There's all sorts of Navy stories about what can be heard, and not all of them are untrue.

How do submarines commonly fail? Is the assumption of a violent implosion warranted?

I would think another failure mode could be water rushing in without the overall structure catastrophically failing, which would actually relieve pressure on the structure as it happened and be much less energetic.

Just note that the body was experimental: while the hull indeed have a thick titanium body, it was mixed with (don't know exactly how and where though) carbon fibers, which are known to catastrophically break under pressure if there's even a microscopic impurity or damage. At least that's what the experts say. Carbon fibers is great for lightweight things that need to bend, terrible for things to be relied under pressure.

It was just the end caps that were titanium - the entire tube was just a 5inch thick carbon fiber wrap. In one of the videos with the CEO I saw him saying that he was a rule breaker because common consensus was that you shouldn't build a submarine out of carbon fiber and titanium.

It was actually the second try at a CF tube. The first had flaws and issues and was either "repaired" or replaced by other manufacturing companies.

Reference to the repair/replacement of the cf tube: https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/20/a-whistleblower-raised-saf...

"The Spencer-built composite cylindrical hull either was repaired or replaced by Electroimpact and Janicki Industries in 2020 or 2021, prior to the first trips to Titanic."

I'd really like more detail on that tube's layup schedule.

Solid 5inch thick carbon composite OR a sandwich design with thick outer facesheets of carbon fiber? I suppose under that pressure not much would take the hydrostatic loads other than carbon, but that seems thick compared to everything I've seen made out of composites.

There are videos of them building it. From what I remember, they rolled carbon fiber around a cylinder, making the flat part of the cylinder. Then they mated two titanium half spheres to the end of the carbon fibre cylinder. This was done using some kind of "glue". Meaning that the middle part had no titanium.

I think it was in Sub brief YouTube video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dka29FSZac&pp=ygUJc3ViIGJya...

Thanks, I see now. Wow, that's a thick layup.

I saw a bit of video where they showed the construction- it’s a few inch wide band of carbon fibre wrapped around an inner tube like a spool of thread until it reaches 5” thickness.

Here's a write-up on the composite part of one of Oceangate's vessels:

https://www.compositesworld.com/articles/composite-submersib...

...since that article is from 2017, it is not clear that this was the unit that actually failed.

Very interesting. Ties sub tech to Steve Fossett, who was working with Scaled Composites before his death.

Not saying they are related at all but I am reminded of this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VSS_Enterprise_crash

A cylinder is much less resistant to pressure than a sphere.

It’s been a while since physics for me, but I was under the impression that this only really applies when pressure is greater inside the solid shape. In this case, it seems roughly equivalent to pulling a vacuum inside a soda can at sea level, which fairs quite poorly for the soda can, and I cannot imagine an unfortified sphere-ish shape performing better.

And composite materials are basically threads embedded in glue. Threads can be extremely strong in tension. In compression, you have only the strength of the glue and the fiber/glue interface strength, which isn't a whole lot. Composite materials are in general poor in compression. Crewed submersible hulls are always in compressive stress from the ocean outside. I can't fathom why somebody would choose a composite for a deep submersible hull. It's just asking for a buckling failure. Bad design choice, IMO.

>Carbon fibers is great for lightweight things that need to bend, terrible for things to be relied under pressure.

Composite Overwrapped Pressure Vessels (COPVs) are fairly common in cases where a pressurized system needs to be relatively lightweight (e.g., spacecraft). To your point though, the failure mechanisms can be hard to model.

In that case it's taking advantage of carbon fiber's strength under tension.

For a sub you have the opposite problem, which carbon fiber is very weak at.

Take this with a grain of salt because I worked on the data acquisition side of COPV testing and not the engineering side, but my understanding is that while carbon fiber is strong in tension but weak in compression, epoxy is strong in compression but weak in tension. So the combination is thought to make a vessel strong in both.

But would make the inside sort of uncomfortable, what with PV=nRT

It's hard enough to make a small hole that doesn't turn into a big hole under such pressure when you're trying to. Even harder for a small hole you're not expecting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_strength If it imploded, maybe its wreckage is banging against itself and that's the sound we're hearing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenacity_(mineralogy) (the direct relationship wasn't transparent)

I worked at an aquarium for a while, and IIRC one of the exhibits discussed how a device equivalent to an average home stereo placed in the water in Japan could be easily heard on the coast of California.

Like evryone else I have no idea but I do know implosions tend to be pretty impressive events and can easily be supersonic generating a shockwave, so pretty loud!

Would you ever give the enemy demonstration of your detection capabilities especially when they know you’re looking for something?

Seems likely, there's no point revealing classified capabilities in this context.

There's a lot of unclassified information about their historic capabilities, I'm pretty sure they can give a lot of detail without leaking anything not already public.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOSUS

https://www.amazon.com/Red-November-Inside-U-S-Soviet-Submar...

A timely response conveys something about how fast we can locate something underwater.

I suppose to detect a noise is one thing, to know what it is is another. The ocean must be full of underwater volcano eruptions, tectonic activity, oil rigs banging and drilling, etc. One of the rescue boats was a commercial cable-laying vessel, presumably laying cables and making noise.

I was a Navy OT A during the Cold War. I worked in the SOSUS community meaning my shipmates and I detected and tracked submarines day in and day out. The fact that it was a small vessel could have made detection of an implosion more difficult. But most definitely not impossible. They also had the last known coordinates which helps triangulate location and a search area for debris fields. This was always something we trained for and hoped to never see an implosion in real time. Sadly, this was not to be.

I thought that loss of communication was an expected part of the trip due to the depth.

I wonder if typical deep sea exploration use relay all along the descent, to ensure comms and raise rescue capabilities.

The three main methods are: acoustic using SONAR to receive data, tether or umbilical cord, and buoy based where the DSV releases a buoy that ascends to the top.

Relays don't really work because you'd need a LOT of them and they'd all have to keep themselves positioned within like 30 meters of each other which is very hard with ocean currents. That's with very low bandwidth VLF radio.

Kinda weird that they didn't have an optical cable tether tbh.

Would be extremely heavy and very brittle

There are deep sea submersibles designed to go a good bit deeper than Titanic which have optical tethers.

wouldn't it basically need to be the same as what they use for intercontinental cables ? tons of shielding and repeaters. maybe there'd be further risk bc if it breaks at the ship it could fall on or weigh down the submersible

Not at all. Shielding against what? It's light. You only need enough of a protective coat to make sure it's stiff enough to not twist and stretch too much and to make it neutrally buoyant. No repeaters needed, base range is about 40-60 km. ROVs going to greater depths use them all the time without major issues.

The real reason is that they were stingy as fuck and that it's mildly impractical which outweighed their complete disregard for safety.

> intercontinental cables

Those also carry electrical power to supply the inline repeaters on those cables. If the cable does not have repeaters, it wouldn't need this, and the shielding could be greatly reduced.

dumb question, are there positioning system for sea exploration ? I assume GPS dies off quickly but maybe something else ?

They have inertial navigation system.

ROVs usually use a ultrashort baseline acoustic positioning system [1] paired with the surface vessel.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-short_baseline_acoustic_...

Might explain why they denied offers from the British rescue sub (IIRC the only available one that could go to such depth) that wanted to come out to try to rescue the crew.

Maybe there is a term from quantum physics that can be used here metaphorically, but I think you can safely assume that what you said is probabilistically true, and probably true for all other comparable assumptions. It may resolve to be false when examined closely in any one particular instance, but it doesn't change the fact that they are working extremely hard to maintain a fog of mystery around their scope of capabilities.

This was quite prescient of you. At first (hours before they confirmed the debris was from the sub), I thought your comment was a stretch, but still plausible- yet impossible to prove. All too often, we dismiss these conspiratorial hypotheses, but now that the WSJ all but confirms your suspicions, I’m scared to find out what other inconvenient truths there are to life

Top Secret U.S. Navy System Heard Titan Implosion Days Ago (wsj.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36439661

It's known that they can detect implosions from very long distances however this is a tiny submarines so perhaps they are just using it as a training opportunity with no other information.

FWIW, there are small (and highly stealthy) military submarines and submersibles, for whom accurately determining destruction based on acoustic signatures could very well have strategic value. So those capabilities (and this opportunity) could be more significant than might appear at first blush.

Ya but even so they could have sent rescue ships there because "we think it could be here" - nothing given up.

I could imagine a cost-benefit analysis making sense here.

- Pro: increased chance of saving a few people's lives

- Con: risk of leaking info about U.S. sonar sensitivity

I.e., the decision would depend on the magnitude of the "pro" and "con" probabilities.

If it imploded the chance of survival is zero.

If they detected an implosion there's no chance of saving anyone's lives. It would increase the chance of maybe finding bodies, though.

Also - Pro: Excellent realistic training opportunity to maintain and upgrade skills

Audible-at-a-distance implosion ==>> Everyone inside is ~liquified

The actual Pro would be "minor calibration opportunity for our secret sensor network".

It gives up bounds on how fast we can locate something.

or don't announce anything and just find it

Other than awe for US military capability.

What motivates this idea?

Not only does it explain nothing, it requires additional explanation.

It's not a complicated or even malicious "coverup". They hear an anomalous sound, but don't know with 100% certainty that it's came from the lost sub. What is the Coast Guard supposed to do, not do anything the past few days and say it's because "Sorry we heard a loud sound at that time and are 99% sure that those people are dead"?

I must be missing something it seems simpler to assume

"Coast guard gets report of lost sub and searches for a while".

Why would you turn that into

"USN knows that a sub imploded. Did nothing observable. Coast guard gets report of lost sub and searches for a while."

I looked at the link, I can't see any reason to interject into that more capability than was demonstrated. It may exist, it may not. There is no reason to comment on additional capabilities based on this event.

My assumption is that hearing this kind of long distance noise is well within the laws of physics and what we know of the U.S.'s capability. So I don't see this as "additional capability", but rather, am asking from a mindset of "How did they not hear a suspicious sound at the time of the missing sub?"

Whether they did or not, nothing would presumably change about the Coast Guard conducting search-and-rescue/recovery operations (since they still don't know for sure what happened). Worth pointing out that private explorers, led by Richard Garriott (aka Lord British, apparently), complained that they had optimal rescue equipment but got pushback from the U.S. officials:

https://archive.is/HXtFn

> “Magellan has received mixed signals, first hearing from US Gov to get ready, waiting for plans, then getting told to stand down,” Garriott wrote in an email sent to Vice Admiral William Galanis, commander of Naval Sea Systems Command, U.S. Coast Guard Rear Admiral John W. Mauger, who is leading the recovery mission, Congressman Lloyd Doggett, and Representative Eric Swalwell on Wednesday afternoon.

Again, hard to know if this is just standard operating procedure or not. If it's the case the U.S. govt already had things figured out by now, then it makes sense they weren't going to expedite Garriot's group, given that the search effort had already resulted in the loss of 1 (maybe 2) search vehicles:

> In addition, at least one ROV, possibly two, was damaged or destroyed during the search-and-rescue mission—a testament to the difficult conditions currently facing rescuers.

Given military subs operate around a maximum of 500msw why would the USN have randomly coverage of hydrophones to detect implosions at depths no military sub would be at? This sub probably imploded around 1500 msw.

A lot of people are saying sounds travel far under water that's true.. but laterally and not between the typical layers of the sea.

Not to mention that these hydrophone systems are at critical choke points not littering the ocean floor uselessly.

It seems motivated by a sci-fi understanding of the physics.

Don't get me wrong things like this happen as cover ups. In this specific instance it seems driven by nonsense.

Hydrophones don't need to be nearby or even at a similar depth. The SOFAR channel acts as a waveguide and will duct sources from other depths as long as the bottom is below the critical depth. As others have said, this part of the North Atlantic is one of the most heavily monitored parts of the ocean as well. No sci-fi physics necessary — this has been done continuously since the 1950s.

So basically you think that the USN should be able to detect the implosion and so must be hiding that they can do so.

Rather than any information specific to this event leading to the conclusion that USN can.

This is the same reasoning "UFOlogists" use to insist area 51 has aliens.

1. Aliens must exist.

2. US must be able to detect any aliens.

3. The US must be covering up that aliens exist.

> and so must be hiding that they can do so

I don't believe I said that. You can draw your own conclusion from the fact that it is within their capabilities to detect, localize, and to some extent classify a wide range of sources in this region of the ocean.

What you won't find is a lot of information about those capabilities in the public domain. Just consider that what _is_ known tells us that we had these capabilities in the 1950s, and that they were continuously improved upon throughout the cold war. This is not Area 51 conspiracy speculation; it is bread-and-butter NRL stuff that is more than half a century old at this point and is classified for good reasons.

I'll rephrase. What about this incident supports your claim?

As far as I can see not only is the answer to that is "nothing" but the claim itself is non-falsifiable.

Maybe there's a miscommunication here; detecting underwater sound from hundreds, even thousands of kilometers away, is made possible via the publicly known laws of physics.

Detecting extraterrestrial aliens requires technology that is not publicly known. Therefore, it is not at all logical to compare "hearing an imploding submersible in the Atlantic" to "detecting aliens/UFOs"

Really you'd need advanced technology to detect aliens if Roswell was indeed an crash landing?

You've got to be kidding!

I fail to see the analogy between "aliens must exist" (a statement for which there is no evidence) and "the submersible imploded" (which is substantiated by debris). The syllogism is simple:

* submarines make loud noises when they implode

* the navy can hear loud noises underwater

* the submersible is thought to have imploded based on debris

therefore,

* the navy heard the submarine implode

I'm not a physics expert, but sound seems to travel for long distances extremely well underwater. So even if they have a buoy at 1000 ft, hearing a loud sudden sound at 10000 feet (the sub's last communication was 1h45m into a roughly 2hr descent) would not require "sci-fi" physics?

[0] https://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/explorations/16challenger/wel...

Yes because if you have a buoy there you need one everywhere...

Doesn't matter, I was curious why people were speculating this and that's clarified.

You believe that USN would detect this, and it's not motivated by any factor in the story. And a conspiracy to cover up capabilities is the only way you can sustain that belief.

Here's my question for you:

Let's assume that in our current reality, U.S. agencies did not detect an anomalous sound. So what we've observed is how they would operate if they had zero foreknowledge or data other than the initial report to the Coast Guard.

Now imagine the alternate scenario in which Navy or NOAA buoys pick up a suspicious sound near the Titanic. There might be a flurry of U.S. gov activity (e.g. communication between NOAA, the military, and intelligence agencies) to make sure it's not a Russian sub, but that would be completely hidden to the public, and for all we know, is something that happens relatively routinely.

In this alternate scenario, what would change about how the Navy, Coast Guard, or any other U.S. official has responded? Coast Guard rescue ships would still conduct search-and-rescue, the Navy would still send a deep sea salvage ship. You honestly think the Navy would volunteer information about an intelligence report that, as far as they know, may or may not be related to a now-missing civilian sub?

In the second scenario the Russell's teapot satellite the Soviets put into space would have picked up the uptick in US military Comms.

Maybe they kept it quiet to not reveal the satellite was still operational? I doubt it given the current situation, mostly likely it'd be all over telegram and we'd have known about it.

What would that have to do with anything?

Russell's teapot is a criticism of non-falsifiable claims

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot#Analysis

Ok, but for posterity’s sake, the Navy has now said that they did in fact hear the implosion:

https://archive.is/pSpem

> The Navy began listening for the Titan almost as soon as the sub lost communications, according to a U.S. defense official. Shortly after its disappearance, the U.S. system detected what it suspected was the sound of an implosion near the debris site discovered Thursday and reported its findings to the commander on site, U.S. defense officials said.

Don't you think it's weird how you'd thought it'd be secret capability and never disclosed.

Instead they leaked it once the debris was found?

LOL. C'mon man, you're the only one here who thought this was some kind of super secret capability. My entire premise is that this was a logically foregone conclusion based on what we know of their decades-old systems and the laws of physics with respect to how sound travels in water.

As for why they revealed their foreknowledge now? I don't speak for the military, but admitting to it vaguely, well after the fact is a significantly different situation than talking about it at the time and making it actionable intelligence. Furthermore, something may have leaked to a journalist, who then pressed them to make some kind of answer.

I am a bit mystified at your apparent belief that the military has any obligation to proactively tell anybody anything, or find it shocking that a military would ever hide things from anybody, to the point that you would attack people claiming that they might do so.

Are you aware that there is, in fact, a such thing as "classified" information? If you'll pardon me linking to that hotbed of conspiratorial thinking, the Cornell Law School, here's some of the basic, completely open, law covering such things: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/798

Where on Earth do you get the idea that everyone in the world is operating in a regime where they tell you everything you want to know simply because you want to know it?

You are operating at personally dangerous levels of naivety, like, levels that are going to cost you money when you fall for a big scam because you thought someone was just informing you of a great money-making opportunity, as everyone always does when they find a way to make money. Or worse. You're light years beyond "rejecting conspiracy theories", you're operating on a Theory of Mind that has no visible correspondence to the real world. This is not how the world works. People and organizations do not rush to reveal everything they are, everything they can do, everything they know, to everybody, all the time, for free, simply because it would be really nice, and the military least of all!

You're misreading me.

I asked what about that link made them think that. The answer nothing.

They were making up explanations about how to maintain a pre-existing belief.

A fully justified, well-established pre-existing belief, not one that they just pulled out of the blue. Mere "pre-belief" is not intrinsically bad, certain sloppy and popular statements to the contrary.

Which also happened to be correct: https://www.cnn.com/videos/world/2023/06/23/exp-navy-implosi...

I've seen a bit of discussion around time of release, especially around it being a putative "distraction" from the Hunter Biden news stories, but that doesn't make any sense; those have been going on for a while now and will continue to go on for a while regardless of this. What I see here is roughly the expected speed of the military internally deciding this is safe to release, through several layers of bureaucracy, all of which are concerned about being court martialed if they are too excited to say "yes" without making sure their butts are 100% covered. I'd even call this a surprisingly fast release, honestly, probably because the physics of this are such that they weren't fooling very many people (and none of the ones who really mattered), except, apparently, psychphysic.

Sound reflects off thermoclines. If there's a thermocline at say 1000ft and you have a hydrophone at 900ft, a sound originating at 1500ft will reflect off the thermocline and won't be detected by the 900ft hydrophone above the thermocline (frictionless pulleys and spherical cow assumptions).

That’s conspiracy thinking. The absence of your question being addressed doesn’t mean it’s plausible. The ocean is generally a noisy place, and the activities of a small submerged vehicle likely won’t raise notice without active listening.

Conspiring to keep secret military capabilities secret?

You're right this is insane.

/r/UFO must be leaking.

A complete non sequitur to assume it was detected with no observable action taken.

What's the conspiracy? That Coast Guard officials declined to say any more than is necessary?

Yesterday the Coast Guard spokesman [0] said he hadn't even heard the notion that the banging noises were made at regular 30-min intervals, even though Rolling Stone published a leaked DHS report the day before [1], something which completely dominated the news coverage and gave people hope that there were survivors. When directly asked about most anything, the officials frequently demurred. Giving out the least amount of info necessary is their standard operating procedure, not a conspiracy

[0] https://www.dvidshub.net/video/887852/coast-guard-partners-h...

[1] https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/titani...

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