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Apocalypse at Sea
By Micah A. Hanks
FATE :: March 2007
For countless generations, man has looked to the skies and reported unfathomable things that would become the stuff of legend. However, it could be argued that many more legends regarding fantastic creatures and occurrences have had their genesis at sea. To this day, reports of sea serpents and other unknown phenomena return to the mainland from the world’s oceans.
Every so often, a large, unidentifiable corpse washes up on a populated beach. From time to time we may even see a choppy piece of video footage showing a large “something” flipping around in the water. Cryptozoologists will hail it as an unidentified reptilian monstrosity, and analysts on the other extreme will chalk it up to something as simple as a log being tossed around by turbulence.
Occasionally, such strange happenings will appear to have a justifiable scientific basis. One such instance involved Cold War technology that was later used by the U.S. Navy to monitor seismic activity in the Earth’s oceans. In the mid-1950s, installation of an undersea acoustic monitoring project, called the Sound Surveillance System, or SOSUS, was begun for use in antisubmarine warfare. It consisted of bottom-mounted underwater microphones (or hydrophones) connected by undersea communication cables to facilities on shore. Placed strategically along the ocean floor, the sensitive array of hydrophones could easily detect radiated acoustic power of less than a watt at ranges of several hundred kilometers.
With time, it was discovered that this type of deep-sea acoustic monitoring could also prove useful for detecting earthquakes or even studying the sounds of large marine mammals like whales. After the U.S. Navy had successfully used SOSUS to monitor low-level seismic activity on the Juan de Fuca Ridge off the coast of the Northwestern United States, the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) developed a similar strategy for monitoring remote areas of the world’s oceans. In May 1996, NOAA deployed an array of moored, autonomous hydrophones in the eastern equatorial Pacific to begin long-term monitoring of the East Pacific Rise, covering an area longitudinally roughly between 20N and 20S. The system was strategically placed in a part of the ocean called the “deep sound channel,” where temperature and pressure conditions are just right for sound to be transferred with little loss of quality.
During the summer of 1997, a series of strange sounds emanating from deep beneath the Pacific Ocean was repeatedly recorded by the undersea sensors. One such sound, recorded on May 19 of that year, was fairly loud; it was received by three separate sensors covering a large undersea area, and over a period of seven minutes seemed to slowly descend in frequency, giving it the nickname “Slow Down.” Experts have not heard this type of deep-sea signal before or since, and its origin was never determined.....
Read the rest of this article in the March 2007 issue of FATE
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