TECHNOLOGY : SEA SPIES
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Sea Spies
About The Programme
The ocean was once famously called "The Silent World". But nothing could be further from the truth. Singing whales, bubbles popping, underwater volcanoes erupting, boat hulls slicing the surface, submarine propellers spinning: the world's oceans are full of noise. And noise, especially underwater, carries. In Sea Spies, Partisan Pictures teams with National Geographic's Explorer-in-Residence Robert Ballard to explore the world of underwater sound: How it is made, how it is heard and how it is masked.
Drawing on his long career in the United States Navy, Ballard will take viewers on a journey back into the Cold War, when the world's two superpowers waged a vast war for dominion under the high seas. Submarine warfare was at the heart of Cold War engagement between the United States and the Soviet Union. But nothing in a submariner's world is overt: This was a battle of stealth, victory given to the side that could run with the most silence.
Requiring an unprecedented investment in ocean science, the Cold War sea battles produced an amazing array of stealth and surveillance inventions: Underwater listening posts on the ocean bottom acting as burglar alarms detecting submarine intruders; quieting technologies that would come to hide a submarine's sound "signature," techniques employed by patrolling submarines to mask their sound with warm ocean currents.
"People like to say that submarine warfare between the US and Soviets was a cat-and-mouse game," says Ballard. "But it's really best characterised as an amazing game of chess, requiring incredible knowledge of how the ocean works."
In Sea Spies viewers will meet the scientists who discovered how an explosive charge dropped off the coast of Perth, Australia can be heard 12,000 miles away.
Learn how the US's underwater Sound Surveillance system caught four Soviet submarines during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The programme also delves into the explosions that destroyed patrolling US and Soviet Submarines.
During the Cold War, Soviet spies were able to thwart the US's undersea listening advantage and even out the "battle for sea silence" by the 1980's. There’s also footage from civilian scientists who track migrating whales using Cold War listening devices that once tracked nuclear ballistic submarines.
Join us on an unparalleled journey to the ocean's depths to discover the science of underwater sound told through the history of the Cold War surveillance.
Underwater Surveillance
Many countries are developing their network of marine observation, marking it out as a vital area of reconnaissance for national security. For instance, the expansion of Finnish territorial waters in 1995 increased demands on underwater surveillance. The new equipment designed in Finland detects modern, quiet submarines. Its purpose is mainly to detect, locate and classify sounds made by surface vessels as well as submarines.
In the States, the US Coast Guard contracted the University of South Florida’s Centre for Ocean Technology (COT) to provide real-time underwater counter-terrorism surveillance in the waters off New York City during a Republican Party presidential convention. Using sophisticated sensors attached to a Coast Guard vessel sailing around the coastline off New York, scientists can monitor possible underwater terrorist activity using video and 3D sonar along sea walls, ship hulls and piers. The equipment scans for suspicious objects and unusual movements in the water.
“We can scan 3,000 feet of sea wall in 10 minutes,” said Larry Langebrake, COT’s director. “It would take eight divers six hours to do the same work. This technology has huge implications for port security, an area of great vulnerability.”