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A new strategy for sending acoustic waves through water could potentially open up the world of high-speed communications activities underwater, including scuba diving, remote ocean monitoring, and deep-sea exploration.
By taking advantage of the dynamic rotation generated as acoustic waves travel, the orbital angular momenta, researchers at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) were able to pack more channels onto a single frequency, effectively increasing the amount of information capable of being transmitted.
They demonstrated this by encoding in binary form the letters that make up the word "Berkeley," and transmitting the information along an acoustic signal that would normally carry less data. They describe their findings in a study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
[...] While human activity below the surface of the sea increases, the ability to communicate underwater has not kept pace, limited in large part by physics. Microwaves are quickly absorbed in water, so transmissions cannot get far. Optical communication is no better since light gets scattered by underwater microparticles when traveling over long distances.
Low frequency acoustics is the option that remains for long-range underwater communication. Applications for sonar abound, including navigation, seafloor mapping, fishing, offshore oil surveying, and vessel detection.
However, the tradeoff with acoustic communication, particularly with distances of 200 meters or more, is that the available bandwidth is limited to a frequency range within 20 kilohertz. Frequency that low limits the rate of data transmission to tens of kilobits per second, a speed that harkens back to the days of dialup internet connections and 56-kilobit-per-second modems, the researchers said.
Transmitting data acoustically could tip off the dolphins and whales to our plans...
(Score: 2, Interesting) by dw861 on Thursday June 29 2017, @04:58AM (2 children)
I was pretty surprised by how uncritical this post was (though have not followed it through to the originals).
For anybody interested in the horrible effects of human-generated undersea sounds on non-humans, I recommend getting ahold of "Sonic Sea".
The full film is about an hour, but here is a short trailer from Youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-jabL64UZE/ [youtube.com]
Like any film it can be criticized, but it is a good introduction to the problem if you haven't thought about the issue before.
(Score: 1) by dw861 on Thursday June 29 2017, @05:01AM
Sorry, just to clarify, by "this post" I meant the original story, not the post to which I responded. I suspect I am in agreement with davester666.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JNCF on Thursday June 29 2017, @07:42PM
I was reminded of The Persistence of Memory [youtube.com], in which Sagan argues for the potential of a global communications network of whales stretching back millions of years that was only recently disrupted by human noise. The suggestion of songs changing by consensus is especially interesting; I would totally buy whalecoins that were mined using a Proof Of Whale algorithm.