The Bloop: One Of The Weirdest Noises From The Deep Sea
NOAAA spectogram of the Bloop.
In 1997, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) captured a recording of an incredibly loud, ultra-low frequency emanating from deep in the Pacific Ocean. It soon became one of the most debated weirdest noises in history.
Naturally, people were quick to let their minds run wild with possibilities, with many believing — perhaps fearing — that the noise was caused by a large sea monster.
The sound was also recorded at stations more than 3,000 miles apart — and only 1,000 miles from H. P. Lovecraft’s fictional sunken city of R’lyeh, in which his famous monster Cthulhu is imprisoned in his works.
However, as Wired reported, seismologists who have studied the sound determined that it actually shares many similarities with the noise made by icequakes — and it’s likely that’s what the Bloop was all along.
“What has led to a lot of the misperception of the animal origin sound of the Bloop is how the sound is played back,” said NOAA and Oregon State University seismologist Robert Dziak.
Often, the audio is played back at 16 times its normal speed in order to make it more audible for the average person. “However,” Dziak explained, “when the sound is played in real-time it has more of a ‘quake’ sound to it, similar to thunder.”
In fact, a survey conducted from 2005 to 2010 studied other “icequakes” caused by pieces of sea ice melting or splitting off of glaciers, and they all shared similar characteristics with the Bloop.
As it turns out, this isn’t uncommon. There are thousands of icequakes each year.
So while it may have been fun, and perhaps even a bit scary, to attribute the Bloop to an eldritch monster-god, it was evidently nothing more than a loud icebreaker for many conversations.
