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However, the speed of sound varies from substance to substance: typically, sound travels most slowly in gases, faster in liquids, and fastest in solids. For example, while sound travels at 343 m/s in air, it travels at 1481 m/s in water (almost 4.3 times as fast) and at 5120 m/s in iron (almost 15 times as fast).
Output of a computer model of underwater acoustic propagation in a simplified ocean environment. A seafloor map produced by multibeam sonar. Underwater acoustics (also known as hydroacoustics) is the study of the propagation of sound in water and the interaction of the mechanical waves that constitute sound with the water, its contents and its boundaries.
Figure 1. Table 1's data in graphical format. Although given as a function of depth [note 1], the speed of sound in the ocean does not depend solely on depth.Rather, for a given depth, the speed of sound depends on the temperature at that depth, the depth itself, and the salinity at that depth, in that order.
The SOFAR channel (short for sound fixing and ranging channel), or deep sound channel (DSC), [1] is a horizontal layer of water in the ocean at which depth the speed of sound is at its minimum. The SOFAR channel acts as a waveguide for sound, and low frequency sound waves within the channel may travel thousands of miles before dissipating.
The oceans are fairly transparent to low-frequency acoustics, however. The oceans conduct sound very efficiently, particularly sound at low frequencies, i.e., less than a few hundred hertz. [3] These properties motivated Walter Munk and Carl Wunsch [4] [5] to suggest "acoustic tomography" for ocean measurement in the late 1970s. The advantages ...
Sonar (sound navigation and ranging or sonic navigation and ranging) [2] is a technique that uses sound propagation (usually underwater, as in submarine navigation) to navigate, measure distances , communicate with or detect objects on or under the surface of the water, such as other vessels.
Sound travels through 20 °C water at approximately 1482 meters per second, compared to the 332 m/s speed of sound through air. [ 10 ] [ 11 ] In the world's oceans, sound travels most efficiently at a depth of approximately 1000 meters.
Upsweep is an unidentified sound detected on the American NOAA's equatorial autonomous hydrophone arrays. This sound was present when the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory began recording its sound surveillance system, SOSUS, in August 1991. It consists of a long train of narrow-band upsweeping sounds of several seconds in duration each.