A new study showed Wednesday that the Earth is continually provoking a hum: a sound that vibrates at such a low frequency that no one can hear it.
This is something that a few researchers suggested not so long ago but had to be backed by other findings.
Scientists have reported the sound only in some zones in the Antarctica and Algeria, but they believe they can notice it all around our world. This new study published in the American Geophysical Union showed that it is also vibrating on the floor of the Indian Ocean.
A researcher described to the HuffPost that these vibrations, popularly called the “hum of the Earth,” sound like the static on an old TV, but slowed down 10,000 times. This doesn’t allow some animals to hear it.
Although no earthquake takes place on Earth, our planet is always moving. The air blows, the water flows, the ground breaks, the temperature changes, and so it goes. Researchers believe some of these movements create the unhearable sound, but they don’t know which one of them is yet. They have theorized it might be the echo of oceans colliding, the atmosphere moving, or the vibrations born of sea and sky alike.
If scientists were able to listen to the sound clearer, they could discover many secrets hidden inside our planet. According to them, it could even teach them how to draw a map so aliens can find us.
Anyway, something is clear: all of them believe the music is being caught clearer every time.
“The earth is ringing like a bell all the time,” said Spahr Webb, a seismologist at Columbia University.
In constant change
The Earth, according to Webb, is always vibrating due to different reasons. Every single natural event has a consequence, and our world reflects it somewhere.
In 2011 Japan, for instance, a significant quake hit the civilization. That made the other side of the Earth bounce up and down by centimeters. However, it was so slow that nobody ever noticed it.
Another team of researchers studying the hum in the Antarctica said in 1998 that the vibrations are always sounding. One of the scientists from University of California at Santa Barbara reported in 2001 that these are “continuous signals” that wave in a range of 2 to 7 millihertz – thousands of times lower than the range humans can catch.
He continued saying that the vibrations never stop, regardless of earthquakes.
Webb is one of the principal researchers in the 21st century who are focused on discovering the cause of the hum. He discarded that the main reason is the interaction between the atmosphere and the ground. Instead, he believes that the primary cause is the ocean waves, which bang on the sea floor “pretty much all the way around the Earth.”
“I think our result is an important step in the transformation of mysterious noise into an understood signal,” told an oceanographer with the French Research Institute for Exploitation of the Sea to Live Science.
There are moments that two different waves collide to one another, sending the vibrations they generate deep down the Earth’s crust. Additionally, there are also other waves which, instead of shocking between them, they hit the ground with enough force to create a considerable reaction inside the world.
Source: American Geophysical Union