![]() It was caused by the detonation of half a dozen torpedoes, which caused a second explosion equivalent to between 3 and 7 tons of TN. Oscar II Kursk: this is a Russian submarine that sank in the Barents Sea in 2000.This would be the first tourist tragedy, although the search efforts are still continuing to find the five men trapped. The latest appears to be the disappearance on June 18 of the submersible belonging to OceanGate Expeditions, a company dedicated to underwater trips to see the wreck of the Titanic. Tragedies might be rare, but there are enough to cause concern and here we take a look at several which have occurred this century.Īlthough technology has come a long way since the beginning of the 21st century, many underwater tragedies have occurred in that time. Vernon, a seismologist at the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics in La Jolla, Calif.With the disappearance of the OceanGate Expeditions submarine this week, the safety of such vessels has been called into question. Unfettered access to such data is vital both for the study of natural phenomena and for verifying the details about incidents such as the loss of the Kursk, says Frank L. ![]() ![]() ![]() Wallace’s team used openly available data recorded at some of the more than 16,000 seismometers installed worldwide. Also, he contends, simple collisions wouldn’t create a bubble pulse. The time that the second pressure pulse took to reflect from the ocean surface and return to the bottom, Wallace says, indicates that it was probably generated when the Kursk was on or near the ocean floor, about 100 meters below the surface. Soon after the submarine sank, some Russian officials claimed that the Kursk colliding with another vessel caused the first set of seismic signals and the sub striking the ocean bottom produced the second set. That blast released 18 times as much energy as the first, about the same as that in the fuel and warheads of eight Russian ship-to-ship missiles. The second explosion occurred more than 2 minutes later and was detected up to 3,100 miles away. Only a few seismometers captured the first blast, which the scientists estimate released energy equivalent to 250 kilograms of TNT-about the energy of a modern torpedo, Wallace notes. The seismic data captured by the European instruments include two bubble pulses. “You could throw just a couple of sticks of dynamite into Lake Michigan, and seismometers all over Michigan would detect it,” says Wallace. Because water is a nearly incompressible fluid, the pressure pulses from even small underwater blasts can generate strong seismic signals when they strike the lake or ocean bottom. Underwater explosions send out a distinctive pattern of pressure waves known as a bubble pulse, which stems from oscillations in the rising bubble of hot gases. Using the techniques of forensic seismology, he adds, researchers studying these vibrations can discriminate causes of explosions as diverse as underground nuclear testing, terrorist bombings, and detonations in fireworks factories. Wallace, a University of Arizona seismologist and a coauthor of the Kursk analysis. Patterns of ground movement generated by explosions differ from those caused by earthquakes, explains Terry C.
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