Rock Site Concept: The 1968 Navy Proposal to Build a Massive Deep Sea Base

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This is gonna be a somewhat morbid article. You'd think I would love the idea of a massive deep sea base, but it was being planned for a very sinister, bleak purpose.

Very few applications are valuable enough to justify the enormous expense of large undersea facilities. Mining. Farming. Oil extraction. Submarine resupply. But also, preserving enough of the Navy in the event that the US is wiped out in a nuclear war that retaliation is still possible.

This base would be capable of supporting dozens of families, like a small town, while supporting the surviving nuclear subs of the US fleet long enough that they could launch revenge nukes at the enemy.

It is a little known fact that the main limitation of modern nuclear subs is the food supply. They have decades worth of electrical power. Enough to make all the heat, light, fresh air and fresh water for all that time.

But the food supply runs out in about three months. What if you had a facility underwater with stockpiled food to resupply from? You could go years, even decades without surfacing.

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Just imagine yourself serving aboard a nuclear submarine when you receive word that your home country has been defeated in a nuclear war. All that remains of it is its nuclear sub fleet and a base like this one. Modern compact naval reactors last 50 years on their built in fuel supply.

That means you can go on living full time underwater for the next five decades as you move to different positions in the sea in order to launch nukes at the enemy country. What's the point, by then? Spite? Making sure they pay for what they did, even if they are the last humans left alive on Earth?

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Basically the plot of Iron Sky, except it's Americans under the sea instead of Nazis on the Moon. Crazy stuff like that was routinely considered due to the seriousness of the Cold War, and the lengths to which both sides were willing to go in order to emerge victorious.

The Orion Project was another good example of this Cold War engineering insanity, but that's another article. The Rock Site Concept was ultimately not approved, because it was competing for funds with the Apollo Project.

Some people claim that the formation seen above is in fact the Rock Site Concept or similar base, burrowed out of the rock of the continental shelf. Probably not, I think it would defeat the purpose to build it in such a way that satellites could expose its location.

It looks like just a rendering artifact. A bunch of these have been held up as evidence of everything from a hole to the inner earth at the poles to undersea bases to UFOs. In each case, just a weird consequence of how the Google Earth software interprets orbital photographs in the process of turning them into a terrain texture.

Some time ago I went looking for more info about the Rock Site Concept, having first read about it in Ian Koblick's "Living and Working in the Sea", only to discover the original proposal has been declassified. Anybody can now read transcripts of it that reveal the scope of Rock Site Concept : Read here

That's all for now. Be on the lookout for the next installment.

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^{Stay Cozy!}