I'm back - been away doing stuff for the last fortnight. You know... stuff.
But now, kids, listen as I tell you about the Bloop.
As some of you may know, during the Cold War Nato spread lines of underwater microphones - hydrophones - across strategic bits of the sea bed - such as the GIUK Gap between Greenland, Iceland and the UK - to listen for roaming Soviet submarines. After the Wall came down things got a bit less secret round the hydrophone office, and scientists started being allowed to listen as well, picking up things like whalesong, dolphins, undersea earthquakes and etcetera. In fact, they found them so useful that they started to lay their own hydrophone lines in areas where Nato hadn't bothered, such as the middle of the Pacific.
And it was here, in 1997, that the Equatorial Pacific Array picked up - The Bloop.
It's about a minute long, rising in pitch, and very loud and low-pitched. It's not a seismic event, it's not a whale, it's not a dolphin, and it lacks the distinctive bad singing in Russian that would mark it out as Sean Connery engaging the shilent drive. But it's probably from a live source, and, given the volume and low pitch, it's from a very large live source. As in, bigger than anything anyone has ever seen ever. It's been heard since around the world. A single Bloop can be heard about 5,000km away.
Unfortunately the story sort of stops there because no one has any idea what could be causing The Bloop. Pretty cool nonetheless, though.
6 comments:
By the way, gossip: my social life no longer consists of 'speed dating while walking in opposite directions' as I remarked earlier. You may ask for additional information, but in vain.
I should have known you would be the first one to turn up on this particular post...
Frustratingly, they don't know - or are not willing to speculate in public - about the exact size of the Bloop thing. But consider this: bigger animals produce lower pitch sounds. Bloop is a third of the frequency of the call of a blue whale. A simplistic and crude comparison gives us something 100m long and about 1000 tonnes in weight; about the size of the tower on the Houses of Parliament. The power required is also massive -although low-frequency sounds travel better, of course. The general conclusion is Oo-er. If you were going hunting this one, you would need a bigger boat. Personally, I'd want HMS Belfast.
On the other matter, I notice you automatically (and correctly)assume that things have got better when that was in no way clear from my original remark; as far as that went, I could have given up walking in opposite directions and simply be sitting still staring at a wall.
So cool. Bloop.
It could also, of course, be something like a catastrophic degassing. In which case, the end of the world is nigh... and they haven't even made a film about this mass extinction scenario.
I can see it now. Bruce Willis vs. humungous methane pocket. Nuke that. Hah.
Liam, do you mean a seabed methane clathrate release event? The 'catastrophic degassing' link seems to be talking about volcanically-induced inversion of a CO2-saturated water column and resulting catastrophic CO2 degassing, rather than temperature-induced catastrophic breakdown of seabed methane clathrate deposits. Score! Ten nerd points to alec!
"Bruce Willis vs humungous methane pocket" has already been filmed; they called it "Die Hard".
I was thinking about a plume-tectonic volcano -- first sign would be likely heating and uplift of area of oceanfloor, hence comparatively small temperature/pressure-change-induced catastrophic degassing. To presage a really, really big one. Bloop. Bloop. Blooooooorrrrp.
I admire your talent for worst-case scenarios. But fortunately that's unlikely to be the case. Bloops have been heard in several different locations over the last few years - equatorial Pacific, off the coast of South Africa, in the Indian Ocean - and it's unlikely that several plume-tectonic volcanoes in widely separated areas would all be getting ready to blow simultaneously. I hope.
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