Families of Argentine Submarine Crew Informed That All Aboard Are Dead
May God rest their souls in peace.
Here’s a close up. Yes it looks uneven. But keep in mind the sail on a sub like that is not part of the pressure hull. There’s a free flooding space between the outer surface and any extensions of the pressure hull inside it. The outer structure is relatively thin plate, in some subs it has been non-metallic*, and welded structures of thin plate are hard to get and keep absolutely smooth, it’s not that things necessarily banged into it.
https://timedotcom.files.wordpress.com/2017/11/hdhhad15.jpg?quality=85
*ARA Santa Fe lost in the Falklands War like some other USN WWII ‘fleet boats’ modernized to various ‘Guppy’ configurations postwar had a fiberglass sail. 2 out of 4 AS-12 wire guided missile hits from British helicopters went through the sail without exploding, another exploded only after going through it.
I’ve been aboard the USS Razzorback. The sail just has a ladder and a place for lookouts to stand protected somewhat from the elements. How do you get dents in the sail? It looks like the fender of a student driving vehicle.
Well, obviously you were in one of those cheap Chinese knock-offs, like Rolexx watches and Sany cameras.
It was a cheap Turkish knock off before becoming a museum boat in North Little Rock. They had to remove the batteries to get it to float high enough to come up the Arkansas River. 
I wish they’d go into detail on how loud a noise has to be in order for it to be heard by agencies monitoring for nuclear explosions.
Depends on how far the bang was from the boom. But sound carries really far in the oceans. This link mentions picking up the sound of a landslide from 5,000 kilometers away. The explosion on the sub would have been much smaller, but there was probably a hydrophone much closer.
Now they finally admit an underwater explosion was recorded after the radio transmission?
Has Argentina let other nations send rescue ships on a hopeless mission?
That’s a lot of money and resources if Argentina knew from the beginning the sub blew up underwater.
The news I read said the explosion was definitely heard by underwater sensors.
Which still leaves us (or at least me) wondering if the detected sound was the sub hull imploding, or an explosion of munitions or whatever.
The Kursk torpedo explosion was heard by various hydrophones and seismic sensors a great distances. It never imploded.
ETA: @aceplace. An explosion is not synonymous with “all hands certain to be dead; so no need to search for survivors or prep to make an underwater rescue”. Much less does hearing an explosion negate the very reasonable desire, even now, to locate the wreckage for forensics.
Per one of the news stories linked to above, the noise “was picked up by U.S. sensors and international agencies that are capable of detecting nuclear explosions.”
Noises are recorded all the time in the ocean. It may have taken some time to correlate the data recorded by various sensors and to use this data to triangulate the location of where the noise originated, and compare that with the planned track of the missing submarine.
This task is complicated by the fact that bearing (i.e. directional) information can sometimes be difficult to accurately determine underwater (especially at great distances), requiring alternative techniques such as time of arrival for a signal. This is itself dependent on the speed of sound underwater, which is not constant (varying with water temperature, pressure, and salinity).
It’s not at all clear that the USN and the CTBTO knew they had detected an anomaly in anything like real time.
It’s far more likely that both went back through the mountains of data they have when the missing sub was flagged up.
The US underwater networks are not likely focussed on that part of the world, and the CTBTO network is looking for something very different.
They were speculating the sub might be on the surface just days ago. A rescue seemed possible.
I know the families are suffering terribly. A lot of good sailors lost their lives.
My dad was stationed at an air base on Cape Cod when the USS Thresher was lost in 1963.
What **LSLGuy **said - the fact that there was an explosion doesn’t mean there couldn’t have been survivors. The Kursk suffered a massive explosion and yet there were still 24(?) crewmen aboard who survived inside the submarine for quite a while longer yet.
My first thought is that after “a short circuit in the batteries”, that gas from the batteries exploded. Why would they report they were continuing to their base submerged? Gases could be vented on the surface.
I don’t know how much this factor applies in this case, but it may be involved.
At one time the hydrophone & seismic sensor capabilities of the various nations were some of their most highly classified magic. And so any detection of any anomaly would not be something they’d be in a big hurry to share with the world, since inevitably that involves sharing the fact of the detection with your enemies.
When an accident occurs there’s a tension between the desire to help save 44 sailors of a non-enemy power. But that’s offset by possibly undoing billions of dollars worth of secret stuff and handing an enemy pieces of intel they can use to more easily sneak attack your country.
In the early hours when an alert goes out like: “We think we’re missing a ship / sub / plane” somewhere near <here>. Has anybody else detected anything?" there’s a real tension between what you may know (or have sitting unnoticed in your archive tapes) and what you want to say to the public.
For close enough allies there may be secret info being passed officially. Maybe USN (or whoever) told the Argentine Navy right away, with the agreement to keep the info secret. So what’s happening now is them metering out the info in vague form in a plausible sequence that doesn’t give away anyone’s capabilities.
I would imagine that Argentina is a country safe enough from hostile attack that the benefits of possibly rescuing 44 crewmembers is well worth the trade-off of possibly leaking sensitive sonar/hydrophone info to other countries.
Who would want to attack Argentina? I can’t think of any serious foe; it’s not like Argentina is Israel, the Baltics or South Korea. The last time Argentina fought a meaningful war, it was because Argentina was the aggressor.
Also, Argentina is a democracy, and the public learning that the government left 44 of its own troops to die, in peacetime, is the sort of thing that bring down governments. No administration is going to risk that.
They haven’t said how the explosion was detected, or by whom. I’d venture a guess that the hydrophone(s) are actually British, to detect any activity aimed at the Falklands, and that the signal information was given to Argentina strictly on the down-low.
The CO allegedly reported the problem had been “fixed”.
Although… the Argentine military and defense leadership have a reputation for lack of transparency and for feeding the people confident (and often outright false) propaganda about how well they are doing. One can imagine a culture of “whatever’s happening, under no circumstance reveal anything’s going badly” would be inculcated throughout the command structure.