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Re:Large Underwater Observatory Disappears Without a Trace by ceejayoz on Saturday September 07, 2019 @03:38PM (#20906000)
> 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.

Re:Large Underwater Observatory Disappears Without a Trace by pvaldes on Saturday September 07, 2019 @05:30PM (#20906650)
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.

Re:Large Underwater Observatory Disappears Without a Trace by ClumsyPilot on Saturday September 07, 2019 @09:41PM (#20908019)
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.

Re:Large Underwater Observatory Disappears Without a Trace by ianai on Saturday September 07, 2019 @09:46PM (#20908039)
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.
Re:Large Underwater Observatory Disappears Without a Trace by ClumsyPilot on Saturday September 07, 2019 @09:48PM (#20908055)
I do not follow what you are saying
Re:Large Underwater Observatory Disappears Without a Trace by ianai on Sunday September 08, 2019 @04:57PM (#20913370)
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.
Re:Large Underwater Observatory Disappears Without a Trace by ceejayoz on Sunday September 08, 2019 @07:38PM (#20914080)
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.

Re:Large Underwater Observatory Disappears Without a Trace by pvaldes on Monday September 09, 2019 @06:18AM (#20916796)
> 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.

Re:Large Underwater Observatory Disappears Without a Trace by ClumsyPilot on Saturday September 14, 2019 @10:38PM (#20975232)
22 meters is not deep enough at all, A submarine is 10 - 20 meters tall.
Re:Large Underwater Observatory Disappears Without a Trace by 52-6F-62 on Saturday September 07, 2019 @04:52PM (#20906443)
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.

Re:Large Underwater Observatory Disappears Without a Trace by ceejayoz on Saturday September 07, 2019 @10:15PM (#20908173)
> 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.

Re:Large Underwater Observatory Disappears Without a Trace by ianai on Saturday September 07, 2019 @05:58PM (#20906819)
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.
Re:Large Underwater Observatory Disappears Without a Trace by ceejayoz on Saturday September 07, 2019 @10:13PM (#20908161)
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.