Earth's Mysterious Hum Recorded Underwater for 1st Time

[LongTomH]

LiveScience: Earth's Mysterious Hum Recorded Underwater for 1st Time:

Far from the blaring cacophony of cities, towns and suburbs, there are far quieter soundtracks to be found — the murmurs of wind rustling grasses, rushing waves tumbling onto beaches, the creaking of tree branches and trunks.

But underneath all that is yet another soundscape, a permanent, low-frequency drone produced by Earth itself, from the vibrations of ongoing, subtle seismic movements that are not earthquakes and are too small to be detected without special equipment.

....................//snip

Recently, scientists traveled to the seafloor in the Indian Ocean to capture the humming sound, using special spherical ocean seismometers. Between September 2012 and November 2013, the researchers deployed 57 free-fall seismometers around La Réunion Island to the east of Madagascar, over an area measuring about 772 square miles (2,000 square kilometers), they wrote in the study.

....................//snip

Using filters, noise reduction and calculations, they isolated the hum from normal ocean noise levels generated by ocean wave motion and seafloor currents, and found "very clear peaks" that appeared consistently over the 11-month study period, and which appeared in the same amplitude range as measurements of the humming taken on land in Algeria, the scientists reported. They noted that the peaks occurred at several frequencies between 2.9 and 4.5 millihertz — about 10,000 times lower than the human hearing threshold, which is 20 hertz.

[OregonBlue]

1. People hear humming in certain places that cannot be explained. Maybe that's what the

Taos humming is. It just happens to be a place where the hum surfaces or is amplified and can be heard more clearly. Fascinating.

[dixiegrrrrl]

2. I had forgotten all abut the Taos humming.

Am real curious what the nosies are that people are reporting all across the globe.

[Brother Buzz]

3. In my neck of the woods, it turned out to be toadfish

Sleuths may have solved 'hum'-dinger of a mystery in Sausalito. A strange noise has been vexing houseboat residents

By Clara Germani, Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
AUGUST 12, 1985

SAN FRANCISCO — First the good news: The mystery of the Sausalito hum may be just a fish story. Now the bad news: Earplugs may be the only solution.

The hum, likened to the drone of a B-29 bomber or a giant electric shaver, has caused a lot of sleepless nights in the houseboat colony in Sausalito, across the mouth of the bay from San Francisco.

Some residents, who recall the nocturnal hum reverberating through the cement hulls of their houseboats for more than a decade, have abandoned hull-bottom sleeping berths where the hum was loudest.

It was only in the past year that enough complaints prompted the Marin County Health Department to step in. Although there was no budget for investigating mysterious sounds, a series of volunteers have lent their feasible and not-so-feasible explanations for the noise.

"It's not a military secret,'' says John McCosker, director of the Steinhart Aquarium. "It's not the sanitation district. It's not the Army Corps of Engineers. It's not an extraterrestrial, a nuclear device, or a Russian submarine.'' Most likely, he says, it's the singing toadfish, also known as the plainfin midshipman.

<more>

https://www.csmonitor.com/1985/0812/ahum.html

[dixiegrrrrl]

4. THAT is amazing.

thanks for the info.

[Judi Lynn]

5. Wow! Toadfish! Had to find more images:

This photo taken from
5 Strange and Unexpected Animal Noises
By Strange Sounds - Dec 3, 2013

http://strangesounds.org/2013/12/5-strange-and-unexpected-animal-noises.html

Many more unbelievable images of toadfish:

https://results.searchlock.com/search/?q=toadfish&slr=1&tbm=isch&sr=pageredir-google&chnm=store

[Brother Buzz]

6. The toadfish in my area are just a plain uninspiring mud color

As a kid, I assumed they were baby sturgeon

[OregonBlue]

7. Truly amazing but not as mysterious as the Taos Hum!! LOL.

Of course, given that Toas is a high Mesa, I don't think it's gonna be toadfish.

[Brother Buzz]

8. What's truly amazing is everyone living on Richardson Bay could hear the buzz...

and only two percent of the Taos population can hear their hum.

[OregonBlue]

9. I've spent lots of time in Taos and cannot hear it. Many people I know who are perfectly sane do

hear it. It is very real. A true mystery.

[Brother Buzz]

10. Many sane people are afflicted with tinnitus....

and it's peculiar that there was not a single identifiable Taos Hum but instead several different ones that people reported; some describe it as whir, hum or buzz. The fact that not everyone heard the same thing is puzzling, and suggests that they may have been reporting subjective experiences instead of objective sounds.

Very real, or not, it is indeed a mystery.