Inside A New Communications System

WHOI research engineer Lee Freitag, aboard the U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker Healy, displays the electronics that is part of a long-range sound-based communication and navigation system that he and a team of WHOI engineers developed and tested in the Arctic. The new system sends sound signals under the ice between buoys and autonomous underwater vehicles, so the vehicles can explore, send information, and receive navigation commands without surfacing. The sound can travel for hundreds of miles through naturally-occurring sound-conducting channels in the ocean water. (Photo courtesy of Lee Freitag, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)