In 1997, scientists recorded a strange, loud sound coming from an area west of Chile’s south coast. They called this sound “bloop”. Researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) recorded this sound through hydrophones (underwater microphones) while searching for underwater volcanoes. These underwater microphones developed by the US Navy were about 3,000 kilometers away in the Pacific Ocean.
“ONE OF THE HIGHEST UNDERWATER SOUNDS EVER RECORDED”
According to the news of Business Insider; Lasting about a minute, the sound was one of the loudest underwater sounds ever recorded. The 16 times accelerated version of ‘Bloop’ is already available on some platforms.
Over the years, theories about the origin of the mysterious sound have multiplied. Some say it’s a military exercise, ships, a giant squid, blue whales or the sound of a new sea creature he suspected.
“We’ve considered every possibility, including animal origin,” Christopher Fox, chief scientist of NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environment Laboratory’s Acoustic Monitoring Project, said in a 2017 interview.
What constitutes sound has preoccupied scientists for years. However, the mystery of the sound remained unsolved for years. Until 2011 that is…
HERE IS THE OFFICIAL DECISION ON MYSTERIOUS AUDIO
Acoustic research was started in 2005, but by 2011 scientists from NOAA came to a conclusion. The official verdict was that the sound was the sound of an “ice quake” caused by the cracking of an ice sheet breaking off from the Antarctic glacier.
NOAA’s Robert Dziak said that after collecting all the data back to 2011, the agency was able to definitively explain what had happened.
“The sounds of ice breaking and cracking are a dominant natural sound source in the southern ocean,” Dziak told Wired in 2012.
NOAA warns that ice earthquakes are becoming more common with climate change.