Thorough discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20886458

Thanks!

> Or, it could be the result of a nefarious military operation conducted by an unknown state actor, but that’s pure speculation.

My bet is that it was due to natural causes. Underwater currents, seafloor landslide or something similar.

That humans did this undetected is possible but why would anyone with the capability bother? It would likely cost more to pull off than it could possibly be worth. And, for a state actor, the consequences of getting caught far outweigh any benefit.

Russia just had a nuclear explosion. The details are not known. They’ve clearly been taking monitoring stations offline to hide any data from the event getting to the world. This would be another.

I doubt it was a nuclear explosion in the usual sense of that term - a fission chain reaction lasting <~ 100nsec with liberation of at least a few kilotons of energy.

A real nuclear explosion - even a small one - is hard to mistake or conceal. Enormously bright double flash, big shock wave, hundreds of tons of irradiated dirt lofted into the stratosphere, etc.

More likely, it was an inadvertent "dirty bomb" event. Assuming this was associated with the purported nuclear-powered cruise missile "Skyfall" (NATO designation), it sounds like their reactor had a prompt criticality incident. This will make a reactor explode, but it's a small energy release compared to an engineered nuclear explosion.

The US had a prompt criticality reactor accident in 1961 [1]. A nominal 3 MW thermal power reactor reached 20GW in 4 milliseconds when things went wrong. Not a nuclear explosion at all, but it killed three people.

I wish we'd just give the Russians all our data from project Pluto [2], so they'd give up this nuclear powered cruise missile development path.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SL-1

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pluto

> The station collected data about water temperature, nutrients, salinity, the speed of water flow, and concentrations of chlorophyll and methane.

Doesn't seem like this thing would've collected much interesting data about a nuclear explosion.

Any sudden peak in temperature and speed would be registered for example. Any sudden change in salinity would be even more interesting. Another possibility is an explosion wave that could dislodge the materials and move it to other places

If I'm understanding correctly, they have the exact hour of signal loses. Ships have predictable and registered routes, (except military). First thing to do should be to take a look to the ships in the area around this timestamp.

If trying to save people and all nations with science was not enough difficult, now with a 30% more of sabotage. Fantastic.

The incident in Russia was too small to have these kind of effects this far.

It is only really traceable through radiation, because our instruments are very accurate and the signal is very clean - it does not change much through natural causes.

Russia was my first thought, but you can't hide a submarine depth of 22 meters.

Conversely, get a small boat, commodity diving gear and 3 dudes, and this is easy to do. You get this kit for a few grand.

That really doesn’t matter to a kgb agent who wants to keep secrets. Don’t know anything about the depth, but seems deep enough.

I do not follow what you are saying

It doesn’t matter whether a nuclear scientist and a fully staffed lab were in that sensor “bed” or not. It’s near enough for them to want it destroyed.

It's a thousand miles away. It's not at all near to the Russian nuclear accident.

The depth is an issue because a submarine can't go deep enough to be undetected there. It'd be visible to aircraft and boats in water that shallow.

> Another possibility is an explosion wave that could dislodge the materials and move it to other places

In this paragraph I was including the possibility of somebody blowing deliberately the station with dynamite for example.

Those things are expensive so the question to ask here is if the station is still lying in the seafloor or was removed by somebody. If is possible to recover it, even partially, could make a big difference for the research team.

I remember putting into the ocean a cylinder full of sensors. It was relatively small, an R2-D2 sized thing or so. The main researcher of the oceanographic campaign was literally sweating with the idea of some chain breaking in the process and losing the small cube property of the university. Each time it was used was like dumping the economic equivalent to a luxury car in the open sea hanging on a chain and hoping that all went ok, several times in a day.

22 meters is not deep enough at all, A submarine is 10 - 20 meters tall.

As a secondary or tertiary effect they could be, couldn’t they?

Speed of temperature, speed of water would be possible results of a nuclear detonation, no?

And methane could be a side effect of dislodging some barrier to a deposit?

I’m admittedly out of my element, but it seems like those are metrics that could be affected by an accident (or test) of that nature.

> Speed of temperature, speed of water would be possible results of a nuclear detonation, no?

It's roughly a thousand mile trip by water from Kiel, Germany to Nenoksa, Russia... and the incident in Russia wasn't a nuclear explosion of the sort you'd see in a bomb, it was an explosion that involved radioactive material.

That’s really not what is going through the decision to kill a surveillance site like an underwater observatory. Something is being observed remotely and they don’t want it.

The observatory in question is four or five hundred miles away from Russian waters, and monitors things locally that aren't of much interest as military secrets.

What consequences exactly? A stern condemnation letter? It’s not some large complex it’s a metal cage with sensor pods, two - three technical divers can spirit it away fairly easily.

The article addresses this hypothesis:

> Other factors, such as a massive storm, heavy currents, or even marine animals, were ruled out as potential causes owing to the weight of the instrument.

> Other factors, such as a massive storm, heavy currents, or even marine animals, were ruled out as potential causes owing to the weight of the instrument.

This part is nonsense. Both massive storm, heavy currents and 40000 Kg sperm whales are able to displace easily matherial of only 250 Kg or shred submarine cables.

I would not discard pirate fishing trawl entering deliberately in a restricted/protected area (supposedly with plenty of fishes). Is pretty common.

Wouldn’t divers report evidence of a landslide?

Bottom-trawling commercial fishing.

Here is its homepage: https://www.bokniseck.de/de

made me think of this story https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-submarine-losharik-un...

I first read this as “Large Underwear Observatory”