Article Excerpt
Carl Hartsfield, an underwater vehicle designer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts who is part of the rescue team, said the sounds had been described as “banging noises.” But he cautioned that some natural sounds from undersea animals can sound human-made, and that acoustic experts were still analyzing the recordings.
Captain Frederick added: “We don’t know what they are, to be frank with you.”
Still, percussive sounds from under the sea raised the possibility that someone inside the vessel was making an “improvised signal for locating the vehicle,” said Jeff Eggers, a retired Navy commander with experience piloting compact submersibles.
“There’s lots of things in the ocean that will make noise and be heard on a sonobuoy, but there are few things that will sound like regular banging on metal,” he said.
Submarine crews who are unable to communicate with boats on the surface are taught to pound on the ship’s hull so they can be detected by sonar. Paul-Henri Nargeolet, a former diver and submarine pilot in the French Navy, was among the five missing passengers.
Analysis
It’s shocking that even in bizarre spaces like under the sea, we can still use sound as a location device. The hard part is determining what’s human, and what’s simply a sound of the sea.
These kind of out of the box rescue techniques open the door to saving individuals who are in such bizarre circumstances that they wouldn’t dream of ever being found. Before these individuals can be removed from said environments, of course they have to be found and reached.
