How do underwater mines work

The closer to the ship the mine is, the more direct damage the ship will take. Other types of damage occur from the bubble created by the underwater explosion as well as the resulting shock wave from the explosives themselves.

Direct damage can be exacted by using more and more high explosives in mines. This will also affect the bubble jet and shock wave. The shock wave from a naval mine is enough to tear out the engines from a ship, toss around the crew, and kill divers. Each kind of damage can do incredibly grievous harm to the ship and its crew. Results from mine detonations can be seen in incidents around the world. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Other.

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Advertisement cookies are used to provide visitors with relevant ads and marketing campaigns. These cookies track visitors across websites and collect information to provide customized ads. Other uncategorized cookies are those that are being analyzed and have not been classified into a category as yet. Monday: am - pm Tuesday: am - pm Wednesday: am - pm Thursday: am - pm Friday: am - pm Saturday: am - pm. Naval Sea Mines to The indicator nets were accompanied by minefield layers, also at various depths.

Finally, British destroyers were deployed to patrol the area. The first success was the loss of German submarine U- 8 on 4 March The Germans found it possible to traverse the barrage, causing the British to improve its effectiveness, spending two months from November shifting it east between Folkestone and Cap Gris Nez. North Sea Barrage — not to be confused with the Northern Barrage in the Second World War, this was a very large minefield laid by the British with substantial help from the Americans between Orkney and Norway to deter German submarines from accessing the Atlantic.

This led to the new Mk VI mine. The Mk VI was designed to be anchored at 60m depth, which was regarded as the likely lowest operational depth of a German submarine. It had five conventional contact horns and an antenna comprising a copper wire attached to and rising above the mine with a float. The U. Navy spends a lot of time in particular thinking about that type of influence mine. The MCM fleet is among the historically neglected parts of the U.

While most of the surface force dreams of tearing across the Pacific shooting airplanes and satellites out of the sky with missiles in sleek modern warships, the MCM fleet tools around in some of the oldest and unglamorous ships in the service. On a tour I noticed red round stickers on televisions, laptops and the odd PlayStation. In the event that the MCM ship accidentally finds itself in a minefield the stray electronics go over the side, necessitating careful consideration of extra stuff that goes on the ships.

Ships also get wrapped in stout electrical cables to provide a more permanent affect on the ship. Mines can be laid in many ways: by purpose-built minelayers , refitted ships, submarines, or aircraft—and even by dropping them into a harbour by hand.

Their flexibility and cost-effectiveness make mines attractive to the less powerful belligerent in asymmetric warfare. The cost of producing and laying a mine is usually anywhere from 0. Parts of some World War II naval minefields still exist because they are too extensive and expensive to clear. It is possible for some of these s-era mines to remain dangerous for many years to come. Mines have been employed as offensive or defensive weapons in rivers, lakes, estuaries, seas, and oceans, but they can also be used as tools of psychological warfare.

Offensive mines are placed in enemy waters, outside harbours and across important shipping routes with the aim of sinking both merchant and military vessels. Defensive minefields safeguard key stretches of coast from enemy ships and submarines, forcing them into more easily defended areas, or keeping them away from sensitive ones. Minefields designed for psychological effect are usually placed on trade routes and are used to stop shipping reaching an enemy nation.

They are often spread thinly, to create an impression of minefields existing across large areas. A single mine inserted strategically on a shipping route can stop maritime movements for days while the entire area is swept.

International law requires nations to declare when they mine an area, in order to make it easier for civil shipping to avoid the mines. A 14th-century drawn illustration of a naval mine and page description from the Huolongjing. The precursor to naval mines was first described by the early Ming Dynasty Chinese artillery officer Jiao Yu , in his 14th century military treatise known as the Huolongjing.

This kind of naval mine was loaded in a wooden box, sealed by putty. General Qi Jiguang made several timed, drifting explosives to harass Japanese pirate ships. David Bushnell 's mines destroying a British ship in American David Bushnell invented the first practical mine, for use against the British in the American War of Independence. It was used on the Delaware River as a drift mine, and was regarded as unethical. In Russian engineer Pavel Shilling exploded an underwater mine using an electrical circuit.

More than naval mines, or infernal machines , designed by Moritz von Jacobi and Alfred Nobel were set by Russian naval specialists in the Gulf of Finland during the Crimean War. The mining of Vulcan led to the world's first minesweeping operation.

During the next 72 hours, 33 mines were swept. The American Civil War also saw the successful use of mines. Rear Admiral David Farragut 's famous statement, " Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead! In the 19th century, mines were called torpedoes , a name probably conferred by Dennis Fletcher after the torpedo fish , which gives powerful electric shocks.

A spar torpedo was a mine attached to a long pole and detonated when the ship carrying it rammed another one. The H. A Harvey Torpedo was a type of floating mine towed alongside a ship, and was briefly in service in the Royal Navy in the s. Other "torpedoes" attached to ships or propelled themselves. One such weapon, called the Whitehead torpedo after its inventor, caused the word "torpedo" to be used for self-propelled underwater missiles as well as static devices.

These mobile devices were also known as "fish torpedos. Following the Civil War, the United States adopted the mine as its primary weapon for coast defense. In the decade following , Maj. Henry Larcom Abbot carried out a lengthy set of experiments to design and test moored mines that could be exploded on contact or be detonated at will as enemy shipping passed near them.

This initial development of mines in the United States took place under the purview of the U. During the Boxer Rebellion , Imperial Chinese forces deployed a command-detonated mine field at the mouth of the Peiho river before the Dagu forts , to prevent the western Allied forces from sending ships to attack.

The next major use of mines was during the Russo-Japanese War of They proved their worth as weapons in this conflict. For instance, two mines blew up when the Russian battleship Petropavlovsk struck them near Port Arthur , sending the holed vessel to the bottom and killing the fleet commander, Admiral Stepan Makarov , and most of her crew in the process. The toll inflicted by mines was not confined to the Russians, however.

The Japanese Navy lost two battleships, four cruisers, two destroyers and a torpedo-boat to offensively laid mines during the war. Most famously, on May 15, , the Russian minelayer Amur planted a mine minefield off Port Arthur and succeeded in sinking the Japanese battleships Hatsuse and Yashima.

Many early mines were fragile and dangerous to handle, as they contained glass containers filled with nitroglycerin or mechanical devices that activated a blast upon tipping. Several mine-laying ships were destroyed when their cargo exploded. Beginning around the start of the 20th century, submarine mines played a major role in the defense of U.

The mines employed were controlled mines, anchored to the bottoms of the harbors and detonated under control from large mine casemates on shore. During World War I , mines were used extensively to defend coasts, coastal shipping, ports and naval bases around the globe. The Germans laid mines in shipping lanes to sink merchant and naval vessels serving Britain.

During a period of five months from June almost 70, mines were laid spanning the North Sea's northern exits. The towed, electric cables of Double-L , magnetic—mine sweeping gear being deployed behind a Royal Navy minesweeper. During World War II , the U-boat fleet, which dominated much of the battle of the Atlantic, was small at the beginning of the war and much of the early action by German forces involved mining convoy routes and ports around Britain.

Initially, contact mines—requiring a ship physically strike a mine to detonate it—were employed, usually tethered at the end of a cable just below the surface of the water. By the beginning of World War II, most nations had developed mines that could be dropped from aircraft and floated on the surface, making it possible to lay them in enemy harbours.

The use of dredging and nets was effective against this type of mine, but this consumed valuable time and resources, and required harbours to be closed. Later, some ships survived mine blasts, limping into port with buckled plates and broken backs. This appeared to be due to a new type of mine, detecting ships magnetically and detonating at a distance, causing damage with the shock wave of the explosion. Ships that had successfully run the gauntlet of the Atlantic crossing were sometimes destroyed entering freshly cleared British harbours.

More shipping was being lost than could be replaced, and Churchill ordered the intact recovery of one of these new mines to be of the highest priority. The British experienced a stroke of luck in November A German mine was dropped from an aircraft onto the mud flats of the Thames estuary during low tide. As if this was not sufficiently good fortune, the land belonged to the army, and a base with men and workshops was at hand.

Experts were dispatched from London to investigate the mine. They had some idea that the mines used magnetic sensors, so everyone removed all metal, including their buttons, and made tools of non-magnetic brass. They disarmed the mine and rushed it to labs at Portsmouth, where scientists discovered a new type of arming mechanism.

A large ferrous object passing through the Earth's magnetic field will concentrate the field through it; the mine's detector was designed to trigger at the midpoint of a steel-hulled ship passing overhead.

The mechanism had an adjustable sensitivity, calibrated in milligauss. As it turned out, the German firing mechanism was overly sensitive, making sweeping easier. From these data, methods were developed to clear the mines. Early methods included the use of large electromagnets dragged behind ships or below low-flying aircraft a number of older bombers like the Vickers Wellington were used for this.

Both of these methods had the disadvantage of "sweeping" only a small strip. A better solution was found in the "Double-L Sweep" [16] using electrical cables dragged behind ships that passed large pulses of current through the seawater. This induced a large magnetic field and swept the entire area between the two ships.

The older methods continued to be used in smaller areas. The Suez Canal continued to be swept by aircraft, for instance. While these methods were useful for clearing mines from local ports, they were of little or no use for enemy-controlled areas. These were typically visited by warships, and the majority of the fleet then underwent a massive degaussing process, where their hulls had a slight "south" bias induced into them which offset the concentration effect almost to zero.

Initially, major warships and large troopships had a copper degaussing coil fitted around the perimeter of the hull, energized by the ship's electrical system whenever in suspected magnetic-mined waters. This was felt to be impracticable for the myriad of smaller warships and merchant vessels, not least due to the amount of copper that would be required. It was found that "wiping" a current-carrying cable up and down a ship's hull [19] temporarily cancelled the ships' magnetic signature sufficiently to nullify the threat.

This started in late , and by merchant vessels and the smaller British warships were largely immune for a few months at a time until they once again built up a field. Many of the boats that sailed to Dunkirk were degaussed in a marathon four-day effort by degaussing stations.

The Allies deployed acoustic mines, against which even wooden-hulled ships in particular minesweepers remained vulnerable. This was profligate and ineffectual; used against acoustic mines at Penang, bombs were needed to detonate just 13 mines.

The Germans had also developed a pressure-activated mine and planned to deploy it as well, but they saved it for later use when it became clear the British had defeated the magnetic system. The U. Mining campaigns could have devastating consequences.

When the war ended, more than 25, U. During the Iran—Iraq War from to , the belligerents mined several areas of the Persian Gulf and nearby waters. In the summer of , magnetic sea mines damaged at least 19 ships in the Red Sea. United States , the International Court of Justice ruled that this mining was a violation of international law. The earliest mines were usually of this type. They are still used today, as they are extremely low cost compared to any other anti-ship weapon and are effective, both as a terror weapon and to sink enemy ships.

Contact mines need to be touched by the target before they detonate, limiting the damage to the direct effects of the explosion and usually affecting only the single vessel that triggers them. Early mines had mechanical mechanisms to detonate them, but these were superseded in the s by the Hertz Horn or chemical horn , which was found to work reliably even after the mine had been in the sea for several years.

The mine's upper half is studded with hollow lead protuberances, each containing a glass vial filled with sulfuric acid.

When a ship's hull crushes the metal horn, it cracks the vial inside it, allowing the acid to run down a tube and into a lead-acid battery which until then contains no acid electrolyte. This energizes the battery, which detonates the explosive. Earlier forms of the detonator employed a vial of sulfuric acid surrounded by a mixture of potassium perchlorate and sugar. Later, the American antenna mine was widely used because submarines could be at any depth from the surface to the seabed.

This type of mine had a copper wire attached to a buoy that floated above the explosive charge which was weighted to the seabed with a steel cable.

If a submarine's steel hull touched the copper wire, the slight voltage change caused by contact between two dissimilar metals was amplified and detonated the explosives. Limpet mines are a special form of contact mine that are manually attached to the target by magnets and left, and are so named because of the superficial similarity to the limpet , a mollusk.

Generally, this mine type is set to float just below the surface of the water or as deep as five meters. A steel cable connecting the mine to an anchor on the seabed prevents it from drifting away. The explosive and detonating mechanism is contained in a buoyant metal or plastic shell.