Them pesky mountains. They sneak up on you.

i think they are just making a mountain out of a mole hill.....

*beep beep*

that would have to suck being the guy that didn't draw the "navigation hazard" on the in-use map. he knows his blame!

don't they have sonar and things to detect large dangerous objects...such as rock?

HAHAHhahaahaha!

Ahem, sorry. I'm really sad about the one that died,
but..
but..
Its a fuckin' MOUNTAIN!
BWAHAHAHA!

Im so bad.

All of Plankton's News Stories are Ocean-centric.

I guess you write about what you know ...

I don't know if subs generally rock their sonar in every direction all the time.

Active Sonar works by high frequency echolocation, that is you fire off a burst of sound and wait to see how long it takes for the echo to reach you and from what direction. This process is very precise and accurate but it has a major drawback for a Hunter-Killer submarine in that it gives away your location every time you use it. As a result although most ( if not all) submarines have them, they are rarely switched on. Passive Sonar works by using accoustically isolated ultra sensitive microphones and sophisticated computers to pick up the vibrations in the water resulting from any sort of movement.
Unfortunately mountains as a rule do not move so they are very hard to detect in this manner.
I hope that explains things

This happened almost 2 months ago, and it's a lot easier to run into underwater mountains than you might think. There's a lot of controversy over whether or not the crew was responsible for the accident because the mountain wasn't on any of the (really old) charts that the boat had at the time although it showed up in recent GPS satellite images. Also, more than half the crew was severely injured.

Did this make major american news when it happened at all? I read about it in some military papers, but it's just now on the BBC? That's crazy.

It was covered when it happened in January.

I follow the news pretty closely, and I never heard about this.