Post 1,058
‘[The] hunch was that the sound nicknamed Bloop is the most likely to come from sort of animal, because its signature is a rapid variation in frequency similar to that of sounds known to be made by marine beasts. There’s one crucial difference, however: in 1997, Bloop was detected by sensors up to 4,000 kilometres apart. That means it must be far louder than any whale noise, or any other animal noise for that matter. Is it even remotely possible that some creature bigger than any whale is lurking in the ocean depths? Or, perhaps more likely, something that is much more efficient at making sound?’
David Wolman there, talking about one of the strangest curios the 1990s, and in a decade that brought us the Spice Girls, that’s one hell of a feat. The Bloop, on the face of it, seemed like just another noise from the deep. But why, then, did it acquire its most marvellous name? The Bloop was no ordinary noise. An ultra-low frequency sound and extremely powerful, it was detected by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in 1997. They were searching for underwater volcanic activity in the southern Pacific when they recorded this utterly bizarre sound. What was the strange tune they heard? Was it nothing that extraordinary or was it, as Wolman believed, some mega-sea beast from hell?
Despite being eager to discover the origin of the sound, NOAA was baffled. 95% of the ocean remains unexplored, and speculation of what lurks beneath is wild and often fanciful. Speculation was soon rife, from some sea beast to a secret underwater military exercise, to ship’s engines to fishing boats, to giant squids to whales. Whatever it was, many suspected it was some giant beast unknown to science.
And they had a point. This was the loudest underwater sound ever recorded and remained a mystery for over two decades. From the moment they heard it, researchers knew what they were hearing was special because nobody had ever heard anything like it before. “It’s unusual when a sound is recorded on all of the sensors we have deployed”, said NOAA seismologist and acoustics program manager Bob Dziak. “If it’s a ship or a whale, when it makes a 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.”
Author Phillip Hayward, greatly annoyed by the likes of Wolman, argued his wild and unsubstantiated comments used words like ‘likely’ and such opened the door to the rampant speculation about what the hell what lurking beneath the Pacific. Scientists remained confused. They just couldn’t figure it out. The recording was even taken to the US military to see if it was some kind of unknown technology being trialled by an evil power of one sort or another. For real. This really did turn into a Hollywood war flick…
The military had no idea what it was, either. Meanwhile, speculation and rumours were spiralling out of control on what was, then, the newfangled internet, still a fledgling little pup. One researcher said, “We considered every possibility, including animal origin. Other things in nature that make that sound are blue whales, for whatever reason, but very quickly we understood when we looked at the volume of the sound, certainly it was much louder than the loudest animal sound [that] we are aware of. To produce a low frequency, you have to be something big.”
The rumour mill was fuelled by an H.P. Lovecraft short story named The Call of Cthulhu. In the story, the underwater city known as R’lyeh is located exactly where the Bloop was recorded, and that I am not making up. By some tremendous coincidence, did H.P. Lovecraft have ‘insider knowledge’ of some remarkable sea beast out there in the Pacific? R’lyeh is said to be where the monster Cthulhu is imprisoned, after all…
Was there any mystery? As recently as 2012, scientists found a rare spade-toothed beaked whale, washed up on a New Zealand beach. Before then, no human had ever seen one and the only evidence we had of it were three partial skulls collected over 150 years. We didn’t even capture footage of giant squids until 2004. Clearly, there is much out there that we do not know about yet. So could the Bloop be amongst the unknown curiosities?
Article after article was published, all trying to get to the bottom of the tale. The ‘organic’ nature of the noise led many of the theories. Many blamed ice. Quaking ice gives off tremendous sound, whilst ice calving and the rubbing of ice, where ice is forced together under the sea, give off loud noises. Could it be? Could ice be to blame and not some mega beast from the unknown?
2012. Not far off 20 years after the Bloop was first heard, NOAA had their answer. The cracking of an ice shelf deep under the waves is a common event, and under the Pacific, the cracking of Antarctic ice shelves as they break away, causing icequakes, let off one hell of a racket. The story of beasts from the deep versus icequakes was, for many, the story of fantasy versus reality.
The NOAA found that ‘the frequency and time-duration characteristics of the Bloop signal [were] consistent, and essentially identical, to icequake signals we have recorded off Antarctica… the sounds of ice breaking up and cracking is a dominant source of natural sound in the southern ocean. Each year there are tens of thousands of [icequakes] created by the cracking and melting of sea ice and ice calving off glaciers into the ocean, and these signals are very similar in character to Bloop.’
For many, this was the final nail in the coffin. The Bloop was no sea beast but the NOAA argues that their claim it could be was never entirely serious. It was nothing more than an ice shelf moving! But anyone who’s heard the Bloop will know just how easy it is to confuse it with some mysterious sea creature. Sounding so similar to many giants of the deep, this story could be easily misconstrued. That said, if you’re so inclined to believe in the impossible, maybe the scientists are lying. Maybe they did find something and were too terrified to tell the world.
So maybe, just maybe, the Bloop is real. And maybe, just maybe, one day it will come for us…
So I’ll give this cryptid a 179 on my patented Cryptid-o-Meter, putting it 3rd in the list of 81, with The Pope Lick Monster still bottom and The Beast of Gévauden still holding top spot.
The Bloop. A fascinating cryptid indeed.
Ciao :)(:
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