It is no surprise part of the tragedy reportedtoday:
“After the [Titan submersible] was reported missing, the U.S. Navy went back and analyzed its acoustic data and found an anomaly [a very loud sound] that was “consistent with an implosion or explosion in the general vicinity of where the Titan submersible was operating when communications were lost,” a senior Navy official told The Associated Press on Thursday.
The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive acoustic detection system.
The Navy passed on that information to the Coast Guard, which continued its search because the Navy did not consider the data to be definitive."
The “sensitive acoustic detection system” is called the Integrated Undersea Surveillance System (IUSS) (some details below). The many sensors of IUSS, some relatively close to the Titan implosion and many more distant in the Atlantic Ocean, would have very accurately triangulated the precise location (rather than “the general vicinity”) and time of Titan's implosion off the US/Canadian coast.
A major and understandable concern of
the IUSS organization, which is part of US Naval Intelligence, ultimately
relying on the NSA, was that the covert sources and methods to process
the large amount of Titan implosion data not become a major public issue.
The main job of acutely precise IUSS sensors in the Atlantic Ocean are to detect and track the very small sounds made by Russian nuclear submarines. Undersea implosions are relatively easily heard compared to submarine movements.
It took the availability of an overt source/sensor (a rare, very deep diving, remotely operated vehicle (ROV) to find fragments of Titan on the seafloor) to make it a public fact that the fate of Titan was now known. It was also out of concern for the next of kin that they shouldn't be told out of nowhere "secret sources, that we can't talk about, indicate your loved ones are dead..."
Some Details of IUSS
On June 20, 2023 I wrote of the importance of “fixed undersea sensors” to hear sounds made by Titan. These sensors principally mean ordinarily Top Secret seafloor microphones. In reference to Titan the microphones precisely locating the implosion are strung along:
1. the Atlantic coast of the North American continent (including Canada)
2. from northern Canada, to Greenland,
to Iceland and then on to northern UK
3. other relevant microphones protect the
US nuclear submarine test rangesin the Bahamas, Caribbean Sea.
The location and large number of these microphones make triangulation of the implosion more precise.
These microphone arrays are operated by US,
Canadian and UK naval personnel as part of the worldwide Integrated Undersea Surveillance System (IUSS)network.
From time to time these microphone arrays (a niche type of signals intelligence) become a semi-public issue, like now. Then the existence of IUSS quite literally submerges, being quickly forgotten by the public.
For much more about IUSS see this Submarine Mattersarticleof May 17, 2022.