If My Career As A Deep-Sea Biologist Doesn't Work Out...

i-5e3992f08435955e2b6c91793e8d6999-2004168670.jpg
...it looks like I could put my knowledge to use sneaking drugs out of Colombia.

In the annals of the drug trade, traffickers have swallowed cocaine pellets, dissolved the powder into ceramics and flown the drug as far as Africa on flimsy planes -- anything to elude detection and get a lucrative product to market. Now, the cartels seem to be increasingly going beneath the waves, relying on submarines built in clandestine jungle shipyards to move tons of cocaine.

More like this

Mexico is on the verge of legalizing virtually all drugs for personal use. The LA Times reports: Mexican President Vicente Fox will sign a bill that would legalize the use of nearly every drug and narcotic sold by the same Mexican cartels he's vowed to fight during his five years in office, a…
tags: hummingbird, Gorgeted Puffleg, Eriocnemis Isabellaea, endangered species, ornithology, birds A new species of hummingbird, the Gorgeted Puffleg, Eriocnemis Isabellaea, has been discovered in the Serrania del Pinche mountains of southwest Colombia. [much larger image] According to…
First, what is a gravitational wave? I find it interesting that some people are expressing difficulty in understanding what a gravitational wave is, as though everybody (who is not a physicist) has a perfectly good understanding of what any kind of wave is. We don't need to go too deeply beneath…
I caught this article on ScienceDaily about the work of Professor Bart Hoebel at Princeton who has been attempting to show that sugar is an addictive substance like a drug. He presents data at the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology meeting to suggest that sugar fulfills the criterion for…

They make it sound so easy to build a sub. Maybe DSN should practice on this.

Actually they're not subs at all. The article calls them submersibles but they're really semi-submersibles (or at least the ones that the article describes). They're similar to some of the ships used during our Civil War when actual submarines were sometimes considered risky, like the Hunley. Though they pick up the advantage of drastically reducing the silhouette when in this partially submerged mode.

From what I'm reading it looks like these guys are making them well enough and actually have a good clue about naval architecture, they even have some Russian naval engineers working for them. So i wouldn't be surprised to see in the near future actual submarines being produced in these jungle shipyards. Though, with the fiberglass hulls the smugglers are currently ahead of the measure/countermeasure race with the authorities so there is no need to go that distance yet.

Maybe you guys could have one built to your specs, they apparently only cost $2 mil or so. It's a deal, of sorts.

Thanks for the info Dave. I'm sure the CIA wouldn't mind us paying out a cool 2 mil for a submersible to a colombia drug cartel. lol