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Low Frequency Active Sonar Gains US Gov. Approval
burntout writes "According to bbc online the US government has finally approved the use of low frequency active sonar. Apparently the navy has been granted an exemption from the marine mammal protection act for this, which is apparently 'necessary because of new superquiet Chinese, Russian, and German subs'."
We taught them a lesson, in 1918,
and they've hardly bothered us since then. - tl
To spur "enterprise Linux," Big Bang, the distributed two-phase commit.
1939 methinks. I don't remember the allied powers doing much to stop the German involvement in Spain and that was about it for German military action that year. Of course, 1939 is only when the war started for countries that hadn't finished selling military technology to the fascists yet.... bad Big Blue, bad
Active sonar is only used in emergency situations.
Using an active sonar array advertises your position to any other submarines in 30-90 nm radius.
The most common use for active sonar is to acquire a definitive lock on a target after torpedoes have been launched.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
...how very sophisticated. Guess the Navy can add whale-watching trips to their recruitment literature now.
. . . good point DuffBeer; however, if you had read the article, you might have noticed that this is towed array sonar, based on ships. The issue here is not stealth, it is detection.
Though this issue is a bit overhyped, once in a while, the Navy does kill a few whales. For instance, in March, 2000, 17 beaked whales died due to getting battered with sonar. (Link to NOAA press release here.)
The Chinese, Russian, and German haven't reallye been developed the swedish, and dutch submarines are the really quiet ones using sterling engines, but this limits them to shallow, costal waters. Active mode is rarely used in historical systems, but this system is much lower in which a strong transmitter is used at a distance and closer sensors hear the echo so there isn't much chance of detection. I'm not quite sure how one knows if this is harmful to marine life, a loud noise to a creature that depends on sound for communications and navigation can't be too happy about someone yelling in thier ear.
Holy sheeet! Anyone know how much juice that must take? http://www.fas.org/irp/program/collect/lfa.htm The shallow-water acoustics problem has risen in importance due to the increased salience of regional conflicts where the US Navy may to encounter slow, diesel submarines close to shore. The shallow-water, slow submarine is significantly more difficult to detect and classify acoustically than the cold war threat, due to the complex propagation, high clutter, and low target Doppler. Effective sonar performance requires new processing algorithms which cannot be implemented on current Naval platforms due the high processing requirements. A Hybrid Digital/Optical Processor (HyDOP) is to demonstrate the feasibility of using embedded scalable high performance digital and optical processing to solve this problem. This requires application of computationally intensive algorithms which cannot be implemented in real time using conventional processors. A high-speed optical correlator being developed by the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) will act as a coprocessor to an Intel Paragon XP/S-25 computer.
Smoking is an expensive, slow, and unreliable method of suicide.
To provide excuses for any action. Destroying the world's most peaceful creatures because we want to kill each other is ironic and disgusting.
Karma:This parrot is dead! (and so is the joke.)
Yes... it causes whales and dolphins to die. Much of the experiments were carried out in the water around Hawaii, thanks to the military idiots that abound here.
And yes, they know that it cause havoc with the animals. It's sad, because whales travel thousands of miles each year to give birth to their babies off the coasts of our islands. Not only will this dissrupt their normal cycle of life, but also will drive them away (which also hurts our tourist industry as well as our scientific industries who try to study the whales).
But, like everything else... our government has it's preverbal head up it's ass and only thinks of itself with it's MIGHT MAKES RIGHT mentality.
I think personally, it is time for Hawaii to secceed the US... kick out the military, and bring back a balance to life on these beautiful islands.
What ever happened to the sonic shadow left by super quiet subs. This would detect super quiet subs, leave the wild life alone and not advertise it's location. Wouldn't this be the best option?
They just wan't to show who's the boss to those pesky
teenagers with huge subwoofers and extra-amps in their cars.
Is bad for other mammals though.
Isn't there a single hard-hearted individual out there that is willing to speak out "against the whales?"
Frankly, I'm all for the sonar. If it saves a few lives (Well, at least lives on -my- side), to hell with the whales.
Whales are -animals-. That doesn't mean I advocate going about and randomly slaying them, but put your views in perspective. This sonar isn't going to be in action all the time, only when there is the possibility that there is an enemy submarine nearby.
Personally, I don't feel like being nuked by an off-shore sub, just because we didn't want to deafen some wet mammals.
With my dying breath, I curse Zoidberg!
Why don't we just destroy all subs and weapons and just get the fuck along ? It seems every day the US Army is looking for a fight and it's just pathetic.
Save the whales, save the money and most importantly save the PEOPLE!
-Billco, Fnarg.com
That's hilharious... this is OffTopic, but I thought it was worth seeing. From http://www.nmagriculture.org/shear_wisdom2.htm
PETA Staffers Kill Deer With Car, Sue NJ Department of Game and Fish for Damages -- According to a news release from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, (PETA), the organization plans to take action against the New Jersey game management agency for damages caused to the car driven by two anti-hunting campaigners when it hit a deer on a New Jersey highway. Rather than slow down, or be thankful they weren't hurt seriously, as thousands of drivers in all states do every year, they faxed Bob McDowell, director of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection's Division of Fish and Wildlife, and John Bradway, chairman of the Fish and Game Council, a notice of intent to sue them as a result of the collision late last November.
PETA maintains that this accident--as well as thousands more that take place every year-- was caused by the state's mismanagement of the deer population, which includes purposely increasing herd sizes in order to provide more live targets for hunters and so jeopardizes the well-being of people who use the roads. In 1999 alone, there were more than 14,000 deer-vehicle collisions reported in New Jersey.
PETA argues that by placing the interests of hunters, who amount to barely more than 1 percent of New Jersey's population, above the safety of the more than 8 million New Jersey residents and countless out-of-state travelers who use the roads, wildlife agencies are violating the state's constitutional mandate to provide protection and security to its people. PETA also opposes the fear, the disruption of herd members' relationships, and the bloodshed suffered by the deer on grounds of cruelty to animals.
Plan to Protect Deer Backfires -- In a related story received by email, a PETA plan to protect Ohio deer from hunters brought different results than were intended.
An Ohio safety law requires hunters to display at least 400 square inches of hunter's blaze orange on their person when in the woods. Capitalizing on the fact that hunters do not usually shoot orange because of its identification with hunter's garb, PETA bulk purchased blaze orange vests and affixed them to live-trapped deer in Youngstown suburbs.
According to PETA spokesperson Katie Reese, a total of 405 vests were successfully put into circulation on deer by mid-December, and the anti-hunting group was still catching and vesting more deer.
Youngtown entrepreneur Guy Lockey, of Guy's Outdoors then offered rewards for returned vests. Hunters who successfully bagged a vested deer could register for a drawing for random and biggest animal awards. Some 308 of the vests were recorded as bagged, based on returns by most of the hunters registering for Mr. Lockey's drawing.
"It's so easy, you can see them coming a mile away" said one first year hunter after checking in his first spike buck. "
Though obviously half baked it's hardly overhyped. It's very different from past sonars. Did you look at the decibel level of the output? The frequencies are also the same the ones the whales actively uses. ie. their ears are best tuned to.
Whales and many other large sea animals depend on having good ears / sonar to go on living. As an urbanized human you technically don't need your ears for survival, but having the sound equivalent of jet engines go off unexpectedly behind your ears would have adverse effect on your fitness. In a worst case, this will mung the ears of large groups of animals rendering them unfit for survival. In the best case it will drown out or interfere with their communication (mating and food finding) and lower their survival fitness.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
A few years back I came across this low frequency active sonar technology and realized that the physics associated with it would help make for an interesting side story in a thriller I was writing. The first LFA towed-array sonar ship due to be commissioned in the series was the Impeccable, and so I sketched my guesswork of how the navy might use this vessel in a combat scenario. In the end the writing turned out to be some of the more interesting stuff in the book. It would be hard to imagine how marine animals would not be affected by 230 dB of noise when the beam hits them. On the other hand, it also seems like a technology that the navy couldn't possibly give up. The book is Ninth Day of Creation if anybody wants to see how this LFA sonar works (or possibly does) in practice. I did have to make some conjectures--it's not as though the navy was very forthcoming in its answers to queries about the ships!