How does a sub hit an undersea mount? Maybe I missed this somewhere in the thread. Do they not have some sort of radar to detect these things or are they running blind based on charts to stay undetected?
They’re not exactly running blind. There’s a ton of background noise in the ocean. We have unbelievably sophisticated acoustic signal processing. The background noise is used as sonar. Unless they were running fast the background acoustics should let you see an obstruction. A nuclear submarine spends almost all of its time running slow so the reactors run on convection cooling. Without the pumps running the submarine is quieter than the ambient background noise. The seas around China are shallow and rivers even more constricted and shallow. Running into an uncharted sea mount is a possibility but I’m guessing it was man made whatever the boat hit or was hit by. The fact that they wanted to wait until the boat was back to Guam to acknowledge the problem tells me they really didn’t want to reveal where the boat had been. Keep unwanted eyes from tracking it back to where the incident happened.
This is very insightful. I like your post, though given my unpopularity here maybe I should not say that. LOL
I would speculate, that is all I can do since I have zero inside knowledge, that there are ways to fingerprint (identify) the background noise sources (perhaps having fixed known positions) and even triangulate multiple signals to echo loacte with out ever emitting a source noise yourself.
Also, you got me thinking about heat signals. If you were close enough to the target and the target radiated heat into the water then you might be able to estimate proximity. The ocean temps drop significantly with depth so the heat signal would be more exaggerated the deeper you went. Obviously turbulence effects results. This is what a snakes pit Organ(pit viper) does. All it takes is a highly sensitive differential sensor and a lot of processing power.
Okay, now you got me thinking. Insects are known to be able to hone i on chemical identities with enormous accuracy - co2, pheromones, etc... I wonder if there are chemical signatures one might be able to identity near proximity as well.
The world of non visual sensing is very fascinating.
