Outgoing wavefront pulse
Listener buoy — detected
Listener buoy — below noise floor
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Underwater sound doesn't just get quieter with distance — it gets quieter at wildly different rates depending on its pitch. This simulator models real underwater acoustic transmission loss: geometric spreading (spherical in the open deep ocean, cylindrical inside a sound channel) combined with Thorp's frequency-dependent seawater absorption formula. Pick a real source — a 20 Hz blue whale call, a 3 kHz humpback song, a 110 kHz dolphin echolocation click, or a 100 Hz container-ship engine — or dial in your own frequency and source level, then drag a listener buoy out along a logarithmic range axis from 0.1 km to 3,000 km and watch the received level and detection verdict update against the ocean's ambient noise floor in real time.