(inspired by a question on reddit, I’ll post a reply too)
Water absorbs electromagnetic signals (at some point, including light). That’s why the only really effective way to look for something under water is sonar (loud sound/pressure waves), and even that has a limited range. That, together with the ocean being so big, is why military submarines can hide so effectively.
A radio transmitter or radio beacon on board of the submarine wouldn’t work because the water would block the signal. However, the submarine could use a sonar beacon, like the ones used on airplane black boxes. The standard ones have a range of several kilometers, but there are low-frequency ones that transmit pulses at 8.8 kHz with a range of 10-30 km (search for “8.8 kHz beacon”). The answer why they don’t use that seems to be simple: They don’t have it. - why they didn’t install it is a good question. The beacons are able to handle the depth too.
One problem with underwater sonar can be layers of water that have different densities (e.g. due to being saltier and/or warmer/colder). Sonar/beacon pulses can be reflected by those, which could possibly make such a beacon less effective.
The sub apparently had a regular “I am ok” ping as well as a way to transmit text messages. How did those work? And if they worked, why couldn’t they do more?
Short answer: ocean is very big, submersible is very small.
Long answer: Imagine going out on a football pitch with a white paint marker. Randomly walk around and pick a single blade of grass to paint white. Now grab someone that didn’t observe you and tell them to find the painted blade of grass. Also tell them they have a limited time, and that you might have pushed the blade of grass doen into the ground.
There has to be a solution that would have allowed them to send a buoy up to transmit a mayday and coordinates like some life boats do. This would help the rescue teams to narrow the search grid. I wouldn’t have gone down in that thing, but if I WAS, I would at least feel better with something like that.
they were two miles deep. sending up a tethered buoy means holding two miles of string on the sub, which would be completely impractical. sending an untethered buoy doesn’t really help anything, because by the time it goes two miles up to the surface, it could have drifted way further than that in any other direction.
A beacon should work as I described in a separate response. A buoy could work too, but the buoy a) would need to be designed to float up from 4 km and still be functional at the surface b) the sub doesn’t necessarily know where it is below the ocean. GPS doesn’t work down there!
It’s also possible it has floated to the surface and they can’t locate it because it’s very hard to see when surfaced.
That sub has melt away ballast connections. The attachments to what allows the sub to sink will melt away after 8? hours. So it may have floated back up.
Problem is they are bolted in from the outside and they have no communications working.
I read an account that a person standing on the recovery ship, could not pick out the sub when it was right next to the ship. It sits so low in the water with barely anything above the surface.
That sub has melt away ballast connections. The attachments to what allows the sub to sink will melt away after 8? hours. So it may have floated back up.
Huh that’s interesting. Do you know where you read that from? I’ve never heard of that on any ship before and now I’m curious.
"Mr Pogue said yesterday he had been told that there were seven ballasts that the submersible could jettison to float to the top.
‘Either they are bobbing on the surface and have no power,’ he told Chris Cuomo on NewsNation.
'Or something happened that overrode all seven of those ballasts.
‘Or the really horrible possibility is the capsule developed a leak, and they’d be dead in a fraction of a second.’"
When I originally read it, the source was not the daily mail, but this article mentions it. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12213755/Missing-Titanic-sub-no-escape-pod.html
I hadn’t heard this, super informative!
Throw a grain of rice into a lake, then try find it. Now scale the problem up, the sea to the submarine is even bigger and deeper than the lake is to the rice.
It’s just a really, really big search area and it’s really really deep, the deep bit matters alot too, it’s a more hostile environment than space.
the ocean is a big, mostly empty place
