SOFAR channel

The SOFAR channel (short for sound fixing and ranging channel), or deep sound channel (DSC), 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. An example was reception of coded signals generated by the Navy chartered ocean surveillance vessel Cory Chouest off Heard Island, located in the southern Indian Ocean (between Africa, Australia and Antarctica), by hydrophones in portions of all five major ocean basins and as distant as the North Atlantic and North Pacific.

This phenomenon is an important factor in ocean surveillance. The deep sound channel was discovered and described independently by Maurice Ewing and J. Lamar Worzel at Columbia University and Leonid Brekhovskikh at the Lebedev Physics Institute in the 1940s. In testing the concept in 1944 Ewing and Worzel hung a hydrophone from Saluda, a sailing vessel assigned to the Underwater Sound Laboratory, with a second ship setting off explosive charges up to 900 nmi (1,000 mi; 1,700 km) away.