The SOSUS mission is declassified

Assembled from 15 blocks · 1 evidence · 10 related

1. Story
2. The mission of the US Navy Sound Surveillance System, a network of seafloor hydrophone arrays built from the mid-1950s across the Atlantic and Pacific, is declassified. Its use of the deep sound channel, designed to hear submarines at long range, turns out to suit low-frequency baleen whale calls exactly. A military listening system becomes, without being redesigned, the first basin-scale whale observatory.
3. Knowledge
4. Passive Acoustic Monitoring Arrays
5. The SOSUS mission is declassified
6. Connections
7. Passive Acoustic Monitoring Arrays
8. Antarctic Summer Feeding Migration
9. IWC Southern Ocean Research Partnership
10. The 52 Hz call is identified in Navy hydrophone data
11. The SOSUS mission is declassified
12. Blue whale song frequencies are observed falling worldwide
13. Blue whales are found back at South Georgia
14. Evidence
15. SOSUS was installed by the US Navy from the mid-1950s as a network of seafloor hydrophone arrays across the Atlantic and Pacific, exploiting the deep sound channel so that low-frequency sound travels great distances; its mission was declassified in 1991. The 52 Hz call was first identified in 1989 by William Watkins of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution from Navy hydrophone data, and the same call was tracked seasonally across the North Pacific over hundreds to thousands of kilometres between recordings. V55 verification basis: retrieved in search summary; neither the Watkins publication nor a Navy declassification record was consulted.