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Re:Almost 25% of world’s seafloor now mapped by walrus01 on Monday October 17, 2022 @06:39PM (#33240414)
the only thing I could possibly think of are receive-only apparatus like magnetometers, which are themselves used by low flying aircraft and surface ships to locate submarines. And likely of very limited value in underwater navigation unless you're in a research submarine literally hovering a few meters above some rocky metallic outcroping on a seamount.

Or something thermal sensor based, there's rumored to be systems that submarines can use passively to follow and track other submarines by the waste heat put into the water.

Re:Almost 25% of world’s seafloor now mapped by pueblito on Monday October 17, 2022 @07:02PM (#33240653)
I suspect the real purpose of the Poseidon nuke torpedo is to avoid the difficulties of detecting subs by over-pressuring an enormous area all at once, like fishing with dynamite
Re:Almost 25% of world’s seafloor now mapped by etiam on Monday October 17, 2022 @07:56PM (#33241190)
I'm not sure how practical they are for mapping but the sensitivity of some such sensors is so outrageous you can definitely measure well beyond a few meters of distance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQUID

Managing the interference is probably the main issue.

Actually, I see now the Wikipedia entry lists prospecting among the uses, so I guess it's quite possibly not only practical but even practiced.

Re:Almost 25% of world’s seafloor now mapped by walrus01 on Monday October 17, 2022 @08:15PM (#33241366)
My understanding of the physics is that SQUIDs only work at distances of max of 50-100mm, not more...
Re:Almost 25% of world’s seafloor now mapped by etiam on Tuesday October 18, 2022 @06:08AM (#33245083)
You seem generally very knowledgeable about this environment and I'm by no means an expert in the SQUID, but the way I understand it it's effectively a magnetometer with sensitivity down to about femtotesla scale. Clearly that could in principle pick up the magnetic effects of many objects well beyond a decimeter, even with consideration of the field rapidly declining with distance.

The main problem in using it, as I understand it, is rather that picking up everything the sensor could detect would usually result in an unmanageable deluge of unwanted information, and it's a normal operation context to filter the signal for distance so as to not pick up too much interference from equipment, staff, etc. But personally I don't see any reason it would be impossible to arrange it to band-pass instead of low-pass in that filtering.