Imagine swimming around in the sea and hearing a piercing sound out of nowhere.
Even if you don’t have thalassophobia, that kind of s**t is scary.
And divers were left shocked after they heard an insane noise while they were at the bottom of the ocean.
Seemingly with nothing other than their fellow divers and sea creatures in sight, they were enjoying the incredible life underwater when they were caught off-guard by the sound.
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A whopper of a sound at that. As they’re minding their business, a piercingly high-pitched noise pings around them through the water with one diver asking a pretty relatable question.
“What the f**k was that?” they ask in footage captured of the bizarre moment.
Turns out, they’d encountered a real sonar ping.
Short for Sound Navigation and Ranging, this kind of technology uses sound waves to detect and identify objects that are underwater.
This is used for various reasons, from the search crews who looked for the Titan sub to conspiracy theorists trying prove the Loch Ness Monster exists.
When active, sonar transducers emit acoustic signals or pulses with the aim for them to hit an object of interest and then bounce back. This then returns an ‘echo’ so the system can calculate the strength of the signal to help determine just what it is and how far away.
Sound is a more reliable tool underwater as light doesn’t tend to travel as well. Unsurprisingly, the most powerful sonar system of all belongs to navy ships.
Different sonar pings can vary in intensity from different sources but generally, the tech is presumed to be safe and inaudible to humans.
It just so happened that this ping was able to be heard by the divers.
One former crew member suggested in the comments of the video: “That sounds like surface ship sonar, actually if you listen closely it’s actually several pings in one because of the different transmitting modes that are combined into one ping.”
Others said the divers were ‘lucky they were far away’ as it could have been much worse if they were closer.
"Commander we've picked up on the ‘f**k was that?’ fish you've been searching for,” one user joked.
People pointed out that the pings are ‘one of the loudest sounds on the planet’ as others said it ‘sounded like something you’d hear in a sci-fi horror movie’ as it didn’t just sound shrill, it ‘sounded eerie’.
Topics: Science, Technology, YouTube, Environment
Jess Battison