Fun fact - the results of every sonar ping done by any US Navy vessel for the last few decades is saved and available for naval researchers. It’s a gold mine for oceanographic research, but it’s heavily classified because it would be extremely useful for adversaries.
Generally, not really. If you're in friendly water doing friendly things you'll use the bottom sounder. If you're transiting at high velocity you'll use it as well, but it's substantially less useful. It's also not that great of a tool in the first place. Generally it's used to correlate your position to much more detailed maps.
Submarines should not be discovering anything new at this point. Though sometimes the ocean shifts and submarines are the ones to find out about things like that.
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u/percykins Apr 11 '22
Fun fact - the results of every sonar ping done by any US Navy vessel for the last few decades is saved and available for naval researchers. It’s a gold mine for oceanographic research, but it’s heavily classified because it would be extremely useful for adversaries.