Word: sonare
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Blackout. The intruder was first sighted, at midmorning three weeks ago, by a sonar operator during a training-patrol mission of three destroyers. The sonar's ping indicated a solid object moving slowly 90 ft. below the surface of the 30 mi. by 40 mi. Golfo Nuevo. The sonar target outsped the attacking destroyers, and out went a call for planes. A few hours later, a Neptune antisub plane reported spotting a submarine; ships and planes attacked, but the target disappeared...
Five days later, sonar operators made the second hard contact, but an attack only sent the intruder to 420 ft., well beyond the 300-ft. range of the Argentine depth charges. On the eighth day, radar spotted a sub, or its snorkel, above the surface. The target dived to 540 ft., but the pursuers heard a sound like hammering for the next two days, possibly indicating damage being repaired...
There was not a scintilla of hard evidence to indicate what a submarine would be doing prowling around the desolate Patagonian coast or to suggest its nationality, except that the U.S. and British Ambassadors promptly disclaimed ownership. Sonar can confuse submarines with whales, old wrecks, even underseas prominences. Most of the world still waited for the Argentine navy to produce a real-life submarine. If it does, the reward may be the biggest appropriations...
Only contact with the surface was a telephone that transmitted their voices in sonar waves to a listening device on the mother ship. Part ,vay down, it conked out, and the Trieste nen drifted on down, utterly isolated from outside contact. Probably the mother ship had drifted sideways and the sonar waves were not strong enough to penetrate at an angle. When the bathyscaph reached bottom, contact was reestablished. From seven miles down, Walsh's voice reached the listeners, faint but clear...
...frogmen are but poor replicas, hydrodynamically speaking, of what a dolphin does naturally." For instance, by swinging their heads from side to side, and uttering ultrasonic boops, dolphins can "look" through 20 ft. of muddy water and tell whether a fish is good eating. The Navy, whose own sonar is much less discriminating, would love to know how they...