The Mysterious Underwater "Bloop"

 

How many of you opened this post by seeing this picture? 

THE BLOOP

Go to this site to listen to the Bloop: What is the bloop? (noaa.gov)

Those of you who actually opened the link and listened to the audio attached on the website, think of yourself as the scientist from the NOAA who listened to it at first during your research. What do you infer from this sound? When I first listened, I associated the sound with a thunderstorm. What did you think at first? Put it in the comments below right now before you finish reading.

Let us move onto the facts now. In 1997, researchers who were listening for underwater volcanic activity in the Pacific Ocean recorded a strange, powerful, and extremely loud sound. It might not sound that loud to you on the audio, but believe me, I don't think microphones are strong enough to pick on such high decibels. The frequency was ultra-low and the amplitude was high. The source location of this sound was roughly triangulated to 50°S 100°W, a remote point in the South Pacific Ocean. Using hydrophones (underwater devices that are used to measure sounds in the ocean in all directions) that were placed more than 3219 kilometers apart across the Pacific, they recorded numerous instances of the noise, which was unlike anything they had heard before. It also had a unique characteristic which came to be known as "the Bloop".

Scientists from NOAA's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory (PMEL) were eager to discover the sound's origin, but with 95% of the ocean unexplored (Fact: We know more about the moon's surface than our own oceans), theories abounded. Of course, human beings cannot let a mystery linger without a hundred or thousand theories revolving around it. Theories such as secret underwater military exercises, ship engines, fishing boat winches, giant squids, whales (that was my first thought), or some sea creature unknown to science (I like this idea).

As the years passed, PMEL researchers continued to deploy hydrophones ever closer to Antarctica in an ongoing effort to study the sounds of sea floor volcanoes and earthquakes. It was in the earth's most lonely southernmost landmass that they finally discovered the source of those grumbles from the deep in 2005. The Bloop was the sound of an icequake—an iceberg cracking and breaking away from an Antarctic glacier. With global warming, more and more icequakes occur annually, breaking off glaciers, cracking and eventually melting into the ocean. This leads to rise in sea levels. The sea levels are rising, guys, why isn't our awareness rising?

PMEL’s Acoustics Program develops unique acoustics tools and technologies to acquire long-term data sets of the global ocean acoustics environment, and to identify and assess acoustic impacts from human activities and natural processes on the marine environment.