Navy reveals classified undersea monitoring, helps scientists

[gnu () toad com <gnu () toad com>]

Further evidence of the spinoffs available when over-classification
can be junked!  Let's hope that President Clinton's new classification
policy brings us these spinoffs from all over the intelligence community...

        Long-Secret Navy Devices Allow Monitoring of Ocean Eruption

NY Times, August 20, 1993, page A1, by William J. Broad.

Some quotes...``For the first time, scientists have closely monitored
the explosive fury of a deep-sea volcanic eruption, thanks to a
super-secret system of underwater listening devices that the Navy has
recently begun to share with civilian experts.''

``The Navy system that the scientists relied on is known as the
Underwater Sound Surveillance System, or Sosus, which for decades has
been used exclusively to track the ships and submarines of potential
enemies.  Started in the 1950's, it now girdles the globe with a vast
network of underwater microphones that are tied to Navy shore statinos
by some 30,000 miles of undersea cables.  The system is estimated to
have cost $15 billion.

``In its espionage work, the Navy filters out the sounds that
geologists find most interesting -- the super-low-frequency vibtations
made by sea quakes and undersea volcanoes.  At 1 to 50 Herts, or
cycles per second, these lie far below the range of human hearing and
are far removed from the higher-frequency noises made by most ships
and submarines.''

``Starting on June 22, the agency's scientists began getting the data
piped directly over a telephone line to the Pacific Marine
Environmental Laboratory in Newport, so that they could monitor
undersea events as they happened. . . . "I honestly expected to spend
months or years looking for an eruption," Dr. Christopher G. Fox, one
of the agency's scientists who set up the system, told the news
conference.  "It only took four days."''

``Dr. D. James Baker, the oceanic agency's administrator, said at the
news conference that the Navy's listening gear would probably have a
revolutionary impact on the earth sciences and man's knowledge of the
planet.  "We want to understand the environment," he said, adding that
the new gear "gives us a window on the ocean that we can't get any
other way -- almost a global picture of what is happening."''