Earth’s Heartbeat – Mysterious Sound is Generated every 26 Seconds
By: Dyedo Tikio
Tags: News, Earth, Sharing, Knowledge Sharing, Explore

Earth’s Heartbeat – Mysterious Sound is Generated every 26 Seconds

Earth’s heartbeat is the name of a sound that appears every 26 seconds, but so far there has been no exact explanation for that sound. Dyedo Tikio Dec 3, 2020·4 min read

Since the 1960s, seismologists on many continents have discovered that a mysterious pulse that appears to be timed every 26 seconds appears once. But for the past 60 years, no one has been able to figure out what this sound really is.

The “Earth’s Heartbeat” was first recorded in 1962, by John Oliver, a researcher at the Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory, Columbia University. He discovered that it came from somewhere in the southern or equatorial Atlantic, and that the sound was more intense during the Northern Hemisphere summer months.

Then, in 1980, Gary Holcomb, a geologist with the US Geological Survey, also discovered this mysterious pulse and noted that it is stronger during a storm. But for some reason, the two researchers’ findings remained largely unknown for more than two decades, until a graduate student at the University of Colorado, Boulder, once again discovered “heartbeat “and decided to study about it.

Mike Ritzwoller, a seismologist at the University of Colorado, recently told Discover Magazine that as soon as they observed the data of graduate student Greg Bensen, he and researcher Nikolai Shapiro knew there were something strange about this mysterious pulse.

They had to work, test equipment, analyze data and traces of fluctuations from every possible angle and even tune the source of the pulse to a location in the Gulf of Guinea, off the west coast of Africa.

Ritzwoller and his team even delved into the work of Oliver and Holcomb and published a study of mysterious pulses in 2006. But they were unable to explain what it really was. One hypothesis was that it was caused by waves, while another suggested that it was due to volcanic activity in the area, but both have not been proven to be correct.

Wave theory goes back to 2011, when Garrett Euler, a graduate student at the University of Washington at St. Louis, accurately identifying the source of the pulse from a part of the Gulf of Guinea called the Bight of Bonny, hypothesized that when a wave hits the shelf continent, the pressure distorts the ocean floor seismic, causing. reflected pulse waveforms.

Euler’s theory seems to be the right explanation, but not everyone is convinced by it. In 2013, Yingjie Xia, a researcher from the Institute of Geodesy and Geophysics in Wuhan, China, hypothesized that the source of the 26-second pulse was volcanic activity.

His theory suggests that the origin of the signal is close to a volcano on Sao Tome Island and that at least another location elsewhere in the world has some similarities with this theory.

But neither of the theories fully explains pulses. Why does the 26-second pulse only happen at the Bight of Bonny? Waves hit coasts around the world and there are many other areas with seismic activity, what’s so special about this place? Those are the answers that no one has been able to explain, but in reality, seismologists don’t seem to really care about it.