Quote:
Originally Posted by thenry
Can't the seabed/depth be detected by any ship in the area?
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Not reliably no. Firstly it's a long, long way down and the other reason is that any deep body of sea is such that there are a number of layers at varying temperatures: thermal layers which attenuate or scatter sound and sonar signals.
Military submarines hide in different thermal layers to avoid detection by enemy sonar. This is also one of the reasons why sumbarines use towed arrays: the sub can cruise at the bottom of a thermal layer but drag the towed array through the layer below to hear what's happening while minimising the chance of detection.