“Decades Later: New Evidence Unveils the Mysterious Origin of the Ocean’s ‘Bloop’ Sound—What Scientists Discovered Will Shock You!”
The Antarctic hydrophones allowed them to listen for underwater volcanic activity.
The noise that launched a mystery
But as Wired reported, one day in 1997 saw those hydrophones pick up an extremely loud, ultra-low frequency sound.
This tone was loud enough that hydrophones placed over 3,000 miles apart were able to pick it up.
Nothing they’d heard before
Researchers logged multiple instances of this loud sound, but its unique characteristics made it hard to describe as anything but the “bloop.”
And for almost a decade, it confounded the world as nothing like it had been recorded before then.
A daunting task
Although members of the NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory (PMEL) were fascinated by the sound and eager to learn its origin, this was no easy task.
That’s because over 95% of the depths of the world’s oceans have yet to be explored by humans. Finding what made the “bloop” was akin to searching for a very loud needle in the world’s biggest haystack.
The “bloop” goes public
According to Wired, a wide array of colorful theories gained popularity as the public gradually caught wind of the “bloop” in the years that followed the discovery.
And as media reports described the sound as “organic” in nature, those theories only escalated.
