This article was published in 1999 and has not been updated or revised. Sounding Out the Ocean’s Secrets he oceans of Earth cover more than 70 percent sci en t i st s a n d en gi n eer s wen t on t o d evi se even m ore of the planet’s surface, yet, until quite recently, sophi st i ca t ed i n st r u m en t s f or f i n d i n g su bm a r i n es d u r i n g T we knew less about their depths than we did both World Wars. about the surface of the Moon. Distant as it is, the Today, researchers apply their knowledge of how Moon has been far more accessible to study because sou n d t r a vels u n d er wa t er t o ca r r y ou t m yr i a d t a sks, su ch astronomers long have been able to look at its surface, as detecting nuclear explosions, earthquakes, and under- first with the naked eye and then with the telescope— water volcanic eruptions. A nd just as astronomers use both instruments that focus light. A nd, with telescopes light to probe the secrets of the atmosphere, scientists in a tuned to different wavelengths of light, modern field called acoustical oceanography use sound to study astronomers can not only analyze Earth’s atmosphere, the temperature and structure of Earth’s oceans—mea- but also determine the temperature and composition of surements crucial to our ability to understand global cli- the Sun or other stars many hundreds of light-years mate change. Researchers in biological acoustics also use away. Until the twentieth century, however, no analo- sound to study the behavior of marine mammals and gous instruments were available for the study of Earth’s their responses to human-generated underwater noise, oceans: Light, which can travel trillions of miles through helping to guide policies for protecting ocean wildlife. the vast vacuum of space, cannot penetrate very far in All of these modern uses of underwater acoustics are sea wa t er. founded on investigative work, dating back centuries, It turns out that, for penetrating water, the phe- into how sound behaves in the different media of air and nomenon of choice is sound. water. These early investigations at first had no practi- Had the world known how to harness the extraordi- cal application ; rather, they were pu rsu ed by cu riou s nary ability of sound to travel researchers interested in a basic through water in 1912, the understanding of nature. As Titanic might have had some later investigators began to warning of the iceberg that build on these foundations, sent the luxury liner to the however, they laid the ground- bottom of the N orth Atlantic work for the development of and took the lives of 1,522 tools and techniques that have passengers and crew. The widespread applications today. tragic event spurred the devel- opm en t of t ools for echoloca- tion, or echo ranging—the Water is an excellent medium technique of detecting distant for sound transmission. Sound object s by sen din g ou t pu lses of travels almost five times faster sou n d a n d li st en i n g f or t he in water than in air. © Digital Vision return echo. Using these tools, NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES Good Vibrat ions Curious investigators long have been fascinated by sound and the way it travels in water. As early as 1490, Leonardo da Vinci observed: “If you cause your ship to stop and place the head of a long tube in the water and place the outer extremity to your ear, you will hear ships at a great distance from you.” In 1687, the first mathematical theory of sound propa- gation was published by Sir Isaac Newton in his Philosophiae N aturalis Principia Mathematica. Investigators were measuring the speed of sound in air beginning in the mid-seventeenth century, but it was not until 1826 that Daniel Colladon, a Swiss In 1826, Charles Sturm (left) and Daniel Colladon physicist, and Charles Sturm, a French mathematician, (right) made the first accurate measurement of the speed accurately measured its speed in water. Using a long of sound in water. Sturm rang a submerged bell and tube to listen underwater (as da Vinci had suggested), Colladon used a stopwatch to note the length of time it they recorded how fast the sound of a submerged bell took the sound to travel across Lake Geneva. Their mea- traveled across Lake Geneva. Their result—1,435 su rem en t of 1,435 m et er s per secon d wa s on ly 3 m et er s per meters (1,569 yards) per second in water of 1.8 second off from the speed accepted today (reprinted with permission from the A coustical Society of A merica). degrees Celsius (35 degrees Fahrenheit)—was only 3 meters per second off from the speed accepted today. study of acoustics. The recipient of the Nobel Prize What these investigators demonstrated was that for Physics in 1904 for his successful isolation of the water—whether fresh or salt—is an excellent medium element argon, Lord Rayleigh made key discoveries in for sound, transmitting it almost five times faster than the fields of acoustics and optics that are critical to its speed in air! the theory of wave propagation in fluids. Among But how does sound travel? Sound is a physical other things, Lord Rayleigh was the first to describe a phenomenon, produced when an object vibrates and sound wave as a mathematical equation (the basis of generates a series of pressure waves that alternately all theoretical work on acoustics) and the first to compress and decompress the molecules of the air, describe how small particles in the atmosphere scatter water, or solid through which the waves travel. These certain wavelengths of sunlight, a principle that also cycles of compression and rarefaction, as the decom- applies to the behavior of sound waves in water. pression is called, can be described in terms of their frequency, the number of wave cycles per secon d, expressed in H ertz. The human voice, for example, Navigation by Sound can generate frequencies between 100 and 10,000 Hertz and the human ear can detect frequencies of 20 Through the ages, fishermen and seafarers had to 20,000 Hertz. Dogs and bats are examples of taken advantage of the way sound travels through many creatures that can hear sounds at much higher water and used rudimentary techniques of echoloca- frequencies—up to 160,000 Hertz. Whales and ele- tion. In the days of the ancient Phoenicians, for phants, at the other end of the spectrum, generate example, fishermen gauged the distance to a headland sounds at frequencies in the range of 15 to 35 Hertz, concealed by fog by making a loud noise, such as ring- mostly below human hearing and thus called subson- ing bells, and listening for the echoes. By 1902, ships ic, or infrasonic. Sound waves, like light waves, also passing along the American coast were warned of hid- can be described in terms of their wavelength—the den shoals by underwater bells placed on stationary distance between the peaks of two waves; the lower lightships. Ten years later, the Titanic tragedy moti- the frequency, the longer the wavelength. vated the Submarine Signal Company of Boston (now In 1877 and 1878, the British scientist John part of Raytheon Company) and others to develop William Strutt, third Baron Rayleigh, published his more active devices that would warn of icebergs and two-volume seminal work, The Theory of Sound, often other navigational hazards. Within a week of the regarded as marking the beginning of the modern tragedy, L. R. Richardson filed a patent with the 2 BEYOND DISCOVERY This article was published in 1999 and has not been updated or revised. British patent office for echo ranging with airborne U.S.S. Semmeswere at a loss to explain or correct the sound, following a month later with a patent applica- ship’s sonar problems during exercises in the waters tion for the underwater equivalent. The first function- off Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. For some reason, the ing echo ranger, however, was patented in the United performance of the devices consistently deteriorated in States in 1914 by Reginald A. Fessenden, who worked the afternoon; they sometimes failed to return echoes for the Submarine Signal Company. Fessenden’s at all. The captain of the Semmes sought help from device was an electric oscillator that emitted a low-fre- the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) quency noise, then switched to a receiver to listen for in Woods H ole, Massachusetts. Columbus Iselin, then echoes; it was able to detect an iceberg underwater associate director of WH OI, joined the Semmes with from 2 miles away, although it could not precisely his laboratory’s research ship, Atlantis, to investigate determine its direction. this puzzling “afternoon effect.” More sophisticated echo sounders were developed during World War I by the allies, but they were no match for the German U-boat menace because they A Sound-Free Shadow Zone could not locate and track a moving object. Shortly after the war, however, H . Lichte, a German scientist The scientists had at their disposal a new device looking into using acoustics to clear German harbors of called a bathythermograph, or BT, invented in 1937 by mines, offered a theory on the bending, or refracting, Athelstan Spilhaus of WHOI and the Massachusetts of sound waves in seawater that would provide clues to Institute of Technology (MIT).