Word: sofar
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...superannuated World War II Liberty ship taken from the mothball fleet, she had been ballasted with concrete and topped off with a cargo of 2,000 tons of overage torpedo warheads, mines and other obsolete ammunition, becoming in effect a floating bomb. Then she was fitted with six Sofar charges with hydrostatic fuses set to shiver her bulkheads automatically under the pressure of 4,000 ft. of water. One purpose of the planned undersea blast was to help the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency sharpen scientific techniques for detection of bootleg underground atomic tests. It was also...
...Sofar proved not so good. When a demolition crew opened her sea cocks, the unmanned R.L.S. drifted out of sight before a brisk sou'easter and lingered for 16 hours instead of disappearing from radar screens in four hours, according to schedule. Where she finally came to rest, nobody is quite sure, and the waterlogged hulk of the R.L.S. is almost "transparent" to sonar blips used to locate submarines. But it seems likely that she lies in about 3,500 ft. of water-not deep enough to activate the fuses. Because the added pressure of a vessel passing overhead...
...pirate in business, and a Frenchman a gentleman in business and a pirate with women, to suggest that pi racy is the key to success. Albion is usually represented by an English gentleman who is one of the most delightful creatures the earth has ever seen, in sofar as it is a question of a hurt swallow or a round of golf, but as soon as it is a question of commerce, the mild gentleman may be come a terrible and stubborn clog...
...communication. But not until seven years later, in 1944, did his system get a trial. Then he proved that waves from a 4-lb. depth charge exploded 4,000 ft. below the ocean's surface can be heard 1,200 miles away. This communication method is now called SOFAR (sound fixing and ranging), and it can carry a signal across an ocean...
...SOFAR put Ewing in the oceanographic big time. He soon moved to Columbia to set up new courses in geophysics. In 1948 the widow of New York Financier Thomas W. Lament left to Columbia her magnificent Hudson River estate. Ewing and his staff moved in. What particularly took Ewing's eye was a spacious underground root cellar (30 ft. by 5° ft) cut in solid bedrock. During the Depression, according to the local story, the Lamonts had stocked it with food to carry them through an expected revolution. Ewing found it an ideal hideaway for his sensitive seismographs...