(inspired by a question on reddit, I’ll post a reply too)
Short answer: ocean is very big, submersible is very small.
Long answer: Imagine going out on a football pitch with a white paint marker. Randomly walk around and pick a single blade of grass to paint white. Now grab someone that didn’t observe you and tell them to find the painted blade of grass. Also tell them they have a limited time, and that you might have pushed the blade of grass doen into the ground.
There has to be a solution that would have allowed them to send a buoy up to transmit a mayday and coordinates like some life boats do. This would help the rescue teams to narrow the search grid. I wouldn’t have gone down in that thing, but if I WAS, I would at least feel better with something like that.
A beacon should work as I described in a separate response. A buoy could work too, but the buoy a) would need to be designed to float up from 4 km and still be functional at the surface b) the sub doesn’t necessarily know where it is below the ocean. GPS doesn’t work down there!
Water absorbs electromagnetic signals (at some point, including light). That’s why the only really effective way to look for something under water is sonar (loud sound/pressure waves), and even that has a limited range. That, together with the ocean being so big, is why military submarines can hide so effectively.
A radio transmitter or radio beacon on board of the submarine wouldn’t work because the water would block the signal. However, the submarine could use a sonar beacon, like the ones used on airplane black boxes. The standard ones have a range of several kilometers, but there are low-frequency ones that transmit pulses at 8.8 kHz with a range of 10-30 km (search for “8.8 kHz beacon”). The answer why they don’t use that seems to be simple: They don’t have it. - why they didn’t install it is a good question. The beacons are able to handle the depth too.
One problem with underwater sonar can be layers of water that have different densities (e.g. due to being saltier and/or warmer/colder). Sonar/beacon pulses can be reflected by those, which could possibly make such a beacon less effective.
The sub apparently had a regular “I am ok” ping as well as a way to transmit text messages. How did those work? And if they worked, why couldn’t they do more?
I haven’t found an explanation, but photos show a trailing cable. The only two options I can think of that could work are
- cable (probably fiber, either way, a physical connection either to the mothership or a buoy)
- sonar (you can modulate data onto a sonar ping)
The reason why they stopped communicating is now (likely) known - looks like the sub imploded.
