11/8/2022 0 Comments Lego movie pc underwatertunnel![]() You’ll receive hundreds of mixed hellos, and you may hear something like “HEhLhelleloolLloHeleoo.” There are so many echoes altogether that you cannot separate them. Now imagine that the sound can bounce everywhere, as they do in shallow waters. You know it is a great place to play with echoes, so you just shout “HELLO.” A few second later, the mountains reply “… HELLO … hello … hello.” These are the sound waves you emitted that bounced on three mountains and came back to you. Close your eyes and picture yourself in the middle of a wonderful valley, surrounded by mountains. Sound waves bounce up and down between them like sound waves bouncing off the sides of a very narrow canyon. In shallow waters, space is confined into a narrower channel between the sea surface and seafloor. But for practitioners of underwater sound forensics, tracking sound waves horizontally, over dozens (and hundreds and thousands) of kilometers is even harder, and in coastal waters, it is a nightmare. Tracking sound waves that travel vertically down into the deep abyss and up again is difficult enough. Illustration by Paul Oberlander, WHOI Creative These airguns basically work like a medical ultrasound, but to image the Earth, the sound waves must be much more powerful and very low frequency. Oil and gas companies, for example, use airguns to find resources below the seafloor. The ocean definitely is not a silent world! Seabed mapping, oil and gas exploration, and underwater communications are all done using good old sound. Dolphins and whales communicate with sound. To communicate, navigate, and explore under water, everybody uses sound. Under water, sound may not travel as fast as light, but it wins the marathon and propagates way farther. These are wonderfully efficient in air, but not at all under water. All these technologies are based on the propagation of electromagnetic waves (light, infrared, microwave, and radio waves). There’s no light, and there’s also no wi-fi, no cellphone coverage, no GPS. ![]() If you are deep under water, you cannot see past your nose. And warping makes it easier to unravel a cacophony of underwater noise and hear more clearly. ![]() Listen in, and you can know what’s going on in the ocean. Well, because sound is the primary means to transmit information in the underwater medium. Wait … why would someone want to warp underwater sounds? At the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, for example, we warp underwater sounds! For some not-so-mad scientists, there is good reason. “So why would anybody bother warping any data?” you may ask. However, what cannot be done in real life can sometimes be done virtually, using a computer. Unfortunately, so far, nobody has been able to actually warp time and/or space. Illustration by Natalie Renier, WHOI Creative ![]()
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