The Loudest Underwater Sound Ever Recorded

scattered about the oceans of the world you might find this this is a hydrophone microphones designed to pick up sound underwater the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has hundreds of these deployed throughout the oceans of the world think of it like a deep sea surveillance system just in case those blue whales start getting any crazy ideas and most of the time that's all they hear you know whale calls Dolphins passing ships seismic activity in some places but not always there have in fact been numerous sounds recorded in the oceans around the world that defy explanation including one in 1997 that was the loudest underwater sound ever recorded a sound that for a while anyway stupefied scientists around the world and led to an array of questions about what exactly was down there [Music] if you didn't already know 97 of the world's water is found in the ocean because of that it is a massive impact on the world's weather its temperature and its food supply but it still remains a mystery in fact more than 80 percent of it has never been explored explored and mapped or even seen by humans what we currently know about 226 000 ocean species there may well be up to more than 90 percent of the ocean species we still don't know about yet some scientists suggest that there could be between a few hundred thousand to a few million more to be discovered and there are a lot of species that we thought went extinct then found out later that nope they're still out there maybe the most famous example is the coelacanth a fish that was thought to have gone extinct 65 million years ago but then one was cut off the South African Coast in 1938 and scientists around the world went that's what scientists do then there's a symbiotic relationship between two marine life forms that were thought to have been extinct for 273 million years yeah scientists published a paper in 2021 that said that they found non-skeletal corals growing from the stalks of marine animals called crinoids or sea lilies they discovered these on the Pacific Ocean Floor off the coast of Japan and then there's everybody's favorite oversized cephalopod the giant squid for years the only reason we knew they existed at all was because from time to time the giant carcass would wash up on a beach somewhere but scientists had never actually seen one in the wild that changed in 2012 when a group of scientists from Japan's national science museum filmed a giant squid in its natural habitat for the first time although they almost caught one in 2006 when researchers suspended bait under a ship off the coast of Japan to try to hook one and it managed to get the bait but it did it without getting hooked because cephalopods are very smart I actually talked about cephalopods once before on this channel and one of the greatest scripts of the 21st century written by one of the world's most thought-provoking scriptwriters playwrights and Rocket oh this is Jason's script isn't it ah Jason got me he got me Scamp anyway the ocean is big and mysterious which is why Noah built that hydrophone array I was talking about earlier a little bit of how hydrophones work in case you're wondering most are based on the piezoelectricity of certain ceramics that create tiny electrical currents when faced with pressure changes after submerging them in the ocean ceramic hydrophones produce small voltage signals over a wide frequency range when they're exposed to underwater sounds coming from any direction and when we amplify and record those signals the C sounds can be measured precisely and when we deploy several hydrophones in an array we can kind of triangulate the Sounds by when they hit each hydrophone to figure out what direction they came from and how far away they are the US Navy used Sona boys for decades to record the sounds of enemy submarines usually deployed from an aircraft or a ship they've also been used in the past to record Marine Mammal calls and listen for earthquake activity but their short lifespan kind of keeps them from being a long-term monitoring solution for recording ocean sounds but anyway this is one of the best ways we have so far to monitor what's going on in this vast expansive ocean because sound waves do travel a lot further in water than they do in air so there's a lot we can discern from listening to the sounds that we record in overtime researchers have accumulated a vast library of sounds so you know what might just sound like a bunch of noise to us is pretty recognizable to them so when they record something that doesn't fit any of their models it's something they pay attention to which brings us to the bloop researchers were listening for underwater volcanic activity in the Southern Pacific Ocean in 1997 when they recorded An Extremely Loud powerful and strange sound with hydrophones placed more than 3219 kilometers apart across the Pacific Ocean they were able to record the sound several times in several places scientists at NOAA specific marine environment lab wanted to discover where the sound came from but the problem was it was so loud they didn't even know where to start like I was just saying normally a sound could be triangulated by a handful of hydrophones but as a director of the Acoustics program at NOAA told Vice in 2017 quote it's unusual when a sound is recorded on all the sensors we have deployed if it's a ship or a whale when it makes the sound in the ocean it isn't big enough to be recorded all the way across the Pacific but this sound was recorded on many hydrophones so it stood out in our mind as being something unique and with nothing else to go on researchers decided to just call it the bloop here's why I'm gonna say you uh can't deny its bloopiness so when word got out about this mysterious sound it of course led to mountains of speculation one theory was that it might be underwater military exercises but none were reported to be going on that day of course it wouldn't be reported if it was a secret military exercise or if it was some kind of secret military technology some people suggested it might be a giant squid but squids and cephalopods don't really make sounds unless it's some kind of undiscovered species of squids or maybe it's Cthulhu seriously some people think it might actually be Cthulhu for those less literate in the audience Cthulhu is a fictional creature imagined by H.P Lovecraft and his story they call it Cthulhu which to be fair this sound was recorded about 1500 kilometers from the spot where the creature first emerged in his story so uh that is kind of weird other theories about what might be making this sound include a huge chemical reaction on the sea floor an interaction of powerful ocean currents and mermaid screaming let's call that last one a maybe and of course we've got the alien theories Advanced underwater species all out of the abyss and Atlantean civilization basically any movie that involves the ocean has been used to explain it but maybe the idea that's gained the most interest is the idea that it's it's some kind of giant undiscovered ocean creature like a a Cryptid of some kind and people have put a lot of thought into this like even speculating on biologies based on the sound and and you know what what it would take to make that kind of vocalization some designs show it as being a gargantuan creature several times larger than a blue whale some speculate that it might be more like a regular whale size but has some super efficient mechanism by which to create sound like like the pistol shrimp which is only a couple inches long but can create sound you know loud enough to stun a prey but then there's this write-up from alphapedia which I'm just going to read to you the bloop's frontal part of the body is large and similar in shape to a shark but it's behind tail part gets thinner like that of a Stingray its limbs seem to be not fins but rather large webbed tubes which Propel it through the water with massive strides the front of its face is an odd nose like bow which increases the frequency of its powerful song so that it can nearly cause human heads to explode on contact the creature's top half actually moves differently from its back half the front moves like a whale and the bag moves more like a saltwater crocodile and look the ocean is huge and mostly undiscovered so thinking this is some kind of giant sea creature isn't that far-fetched for example the call of a blue whale can reach up to 180 decibels that's as loud as a Jet Plane they can also make calls at 14 Hertz which is a frequency well below our hearing ability these low frequency sounds travel further with less Distortion transmission loss and scattering this means blue whales can communicate with each other over thousands of kilometers but there's a Twist in the Unsolved Mystery of the bloop and that twist is it's actually been solved we've known what it is for a long time so over the years NOAA has deployed hydrophone arrays closer and closer to Antarctica to study the sound of seafloor earthquakes and volcanoes around that area and in 2005 that's when they finally discovered the bloop Source it was the sound of an Ice Quake which is an iceberg cracking and breaking away from the Antarctic Glacier kind of anticlimactic of course you know when you think about it or more frightening if you're concerned about climate change I mean this isn't really about climate change though climate change is causing glaciers to crack and break apart more often so ice Quakes are actually called cryosisms which might be my new favorite word and the way they work is that the water in the ground often freezes really quickly which makes it expand when it expands too much it breaks out the soil surrounding it creating cracks in the ground so when temperatures drop at night that top layer of slush freezes too quickly and then the water underneath the slush requires more time to freeze once it freezes again it expands which causes the slush to crack causing an Ice Quake but like I said before the bloop is not the only mysterious C sound that we've recorded there are actually several unexplained sounds from the ocean that we still don't know what's making them like there's the up sweep it consists of a long train of sounds that sweep repeatedly upwards creating a howl from low to high frequencies Noah first detected it in the Pacific Ocean in 1991. the weird thing is that it actually changes throughout the year and it peaks in the spring and fall but scientists aren't sure if this is because there are changes in the source or if the environment the sound travels through changes one possible explanation for this is undersea volcanoes maybe the sounds come from hot lava pouring out into the cold ocean water and solidifying and while it's still detectable it's an level has been slowly declining since its Discovery but here's what it sounds like the whistle is another sound that may have come from volcanic activity recorded just once in the Pacific Ocean in 1997 researchers haven't been able to pinpoint The Source you need three microphones for that and only one microphone picked up the sound that's a microphone hydrophone but here's what that one sounds like in 1999 Noah recorded the Julia sound it was so loud that the entire equatorial Pacific Ocean autonomous hydrophone array heard it that was a lot of words uh the sound lasted just under three minutes its most likely Soros was a large iceberg that ran a ground off Antarctica with its point of origin somewhere between the bransfield streets and capodair and I'm not going to play the whole three-minute clip but here's what that sounded like another sound that could have come from an iceberg running around was called slow down first recorded in 1997 the sound decreased in frequency over seven minutes while an iceberg running aground is still one hypothesis another is that the sound of it's the sound of ice moving over land in Antarctica and let's hear that slow down [Laughter] and then there's the train which was recorded in 1997 on the Eastern equatorial Pacific autonomous hydrophone array it was a steady sound of about 32 to 35 Hertz and it was most likely a large Iceberg grounding itself off the Ross sea near capodair I want to end by talking about another sound that we've recorded that we actually know its origin but it doesn't make it any less mysterious or sad this one's kind of sad it's called the 52 Hertz whale it's also known as the world's loneliest whale get those tissues out guys researchers at the Woods Hall oceanographic institution heard the whale sound in 1989. it was unusual because it came in at 52 Hertz which is actually really high for a whale species the institution wrote in a report in 2000 that quote this Sound Source has been the only one with this call structure in the entire listening area we've been tracking this call since 1992 and have not identified the whale species so they think it might actually be a hybrid whale and there could be good news it may not actually be as lonely as we think whales in different areas have different dialects so its sound may be recognized by other blue whales Christopher Clark director of bioacoustics research program at Cornell told Smithsonian Magazine in 2015 that quote the animals singing with a lot of the same features of a typical blue whale song blue whales fin whales and humpback whales all these whales can hear this guy they're not deaf he's just odd there's an idea for a children's book about this whale somewhere what's not odd is our unique ability to turn toward wild theories when something is mysterious you know somebody doesn't like the sunlight must be a vampire hear a weird sound in your attic it must be a stranger living up there that you don't know about can only see a straight line on the horizon the world must be flat and massive worldwide conspiracy top gun Maverick got nominated for Best Picture award scientologists are clearly tallying the votes Mysteries are fun they're exciting that's why I talk about them on this channel all the time you know they engage both sides of our brains but they can also be a bit of a letdown sometimes when they're solved because like I always say the simplest answer is usually the most likely like a lot of people wanted to believe that the bloop was a mythical sea creature created by a horror writer's imagination but it's that imagination that frankly I think is actually kind of cool look I've made no secret on this channel that I'm not really into conspiracy theories and I tend to hit the woo-woo alarm on cryptozoology and that kind of thing but but I love the creativity that people show and you know trying to figure out how creatures like this might exist it's an exercise in speculative biology like like how we imagine aliens might look like or how they might live on other worlds like I'll shout out my buddy Andy Weir um you know the way he conceptualized the rocky character in Project Hail Mary um we talked about on my podcast Shameless blog but it just blew my mind like the level of thinking that he put into that stuff it's just it's really cool to me and with a suspected 80 to 90 of the ocean species still to be discovered especially when you consider what we've already found at the depths of the ocean which are just mind-blowing you know um there's a lot of room for that kind of thinking to be applied to the bloop or any of these other sounds and why not it's fun so yeah the ocean is big and full of Terrors but you know it's really terrifying the money you're spending on shaving there's a reason why a whole industry shifted to selling these cartridge razors and it ain't because they're making less money off of it but one company is out to change that model and that's today's sponsor Henson shaving with Henson you spend money once on a Precision engineer razor made out of airspace grade aluminum on Aerospace grade equipment and that's pretty 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Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 641,154

Keywords: answers with joe, joe scott

Id: MNCNnAouQOE

Length: 16min 41sec (1001 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 20 2023