The previous time he was heard in Great Britain, in Bristol, and for a long time was sorted out in newspapers. And so he appeared again, this time sweeping across the planet. In August 2011, in 2012 and at the beginning of 2013, he was heard in Brazil, the USA, Canada, Russia, Ukraine, Australia, Europe and Asia.
Its main feature is that it causes causeless panic in people. He is the so-called "groan" or "hum" of the Earth. Is it a sound hallucination, tectonic plate movement, acoustic gravity waves, mass psychosis, or just a newspaper duck? Let's try to figure it out.
We hear moans from everywhere
Doug Shafer, Ontario (Canada):
- These sounds were very intense, it seemed that everything was rumbling. It's like a huge ocean.
Natalia and Marina Eroshenko, Rostov-on-Don:
Promotional video:
- The noise was so unusual that it cannot even be compared with anything. He was powerful
and scary. Direct roar of some kind, as if an airplane was flying directly over the house.
Tatiana Miteleva, Moscow:
- He came as if from the Earth, but was everywhere. And for me it was a little incomprehensible and scary.
Ilya Bogomolov, Rostov-on-Don:
- He seemed to be everywhere, around. So low, scary enough, unlike any other sound.
Roman and Gennady Ovchinnikov, Novokuznetsk:
- He woke me up at night. A strange hum, even through a closed window. A sense of unreasonable panic is created. And literally you don't even know what to do at this moment. It really became scary, I thought that it was already necessary to collect things, a child, documents - to run somewhere. It is not clear where he was coming from, the feeling was as if this sound was enveloping.
This is a selection of numerous programs and Internet videos. The largest series of such noises swept the planet from January 9 to 12, 2012. For these four days, the Earth, according to news correspondents from various channels, literally rumbled. Amateur audio and video recordings have been recorded on all continents. The media assured that no one had ever heard these sounds until now.
This is not entirely true. For years, residents of Taos, New Mexico, in the southwestern United States, have heard a low-frequency hum coming from the desert. The phenomenon is called "Taoist noise". The sound is similar to the movement of heavy equipment on a highway, although there are no major roads in the area of the small settlement.
This sound is heard only by local residents and very rarely by visitors.
Scientists who have investigated this hum have never been able to find its source. They only suggested that the reason for it might be a large power transmission line passing near the city. Meanwhile, such a noise has been known for a long time, and it is called a sound anomaly.
This is a generic name for a number of phenomena associated with a constant or periodic low-frequency hum, which is not distinguishable for all people. These noises are recorded in all parts of the globe. In some cases, the sound source has been installed. For example, noise in Hawaii heard tens of kilometers away was the result of volcanic activity.
Usually, noises are described by bystanders as an idle sound from a running diesel engine. As a rule, they cannot be recorded using a microphone, and most importantly, the source cannot be accurately identified.
However, there were cases when the sound was heard not only by a certain part of people. An example of this is the "Bristol Rumble", which was allegedly heard in the UK in the 1970s.
"Sounds of the apocalypse" or "crunch of the Earth" - this is the name of the sound anomaly, which was noticed in different parts of the planet in the past two years. Unlike other similar phenomena, the hum was heard by most people, and the equipment recorded it perfectly.
APOCALYPTIC VERSION
Needless to say, even the most incredulous started talking about the notorious end of the world. The fact is that different beliefs say the same thing: a certain sound will notify people about the apocalypse. The Jews believe that it will be, but the trumpet is a shofar, from the sounds of which Jericho once fell. Many immediately began to experiment with audio recordings of the "groan" of the Earth and, of course, came to the conclusion that this was the sound of Jericho trumpets.
Heimdall. Little Edda Icelandic manuscript, 1760. Heimdall in Scandinavian mythology is the guardian of the gods who lives at the edge of the world, the owner of the golden horn, Gjallarhorn, whose sound will be heard in all corners of the world. The sound of his horn will herald the beginning of Ragnarok.
In German-Scandinavian mythology, the golden horn of Gjallarhorn will announce the beginning of the Scandinavian end of the world with a cheerful name Ragnarok. The planet's creak certainly resembles it. In Kiev, where the Earth also "screamed", they started talking about the "Archangel's trumpets", foreshadowing That Day …
In fact, the "noise of the earth" has been known for a very long time. There are references to a certain "trumpet voice" both in the Bible and in the Koran. The ancient Greeks explained the underground groans by the fact that in its depths there were one hundred-armed giants, cast down by the gods into the bosom of the Earth. According to mythology, it was not only they who were tormented - Mother Earth also "groaned" from them.
MANUAL VERSION
The most common. Some geologists, for example, associate the mysterious rumble in Novokuznetsk with the development of coal in the Kuzbass. The energy of rock explosions allegedly accumulates in the Earth, and provokes either man-made earthquakes or mysterious noises.
Scientists from the Novosibirsk Academgorodok share a similar version. In 1982, when the Americans arrived in the town, one of the professors-geologists Aleksey Dmitriev allegedly warned them that serious cataclysms would soon await America, meaning man-made earthquakes and noise. The Americans did not believe him then, but in 1984 geophysical hums and small earthquakes swept across the entire East Coast of the United States.
Alexei Dmitriev argues that it was not difficult to predict them, since more than a dozen energy-intensive high-voltage power lines stretch along the East Atlantic coast of the United States. The frequency of the transmitted current in the US power system is 60 Hz. And since it corresponds to the frequency of natural lithospheric currents, a "short circuit" occurred …
The technogenic version has only two flaws. If the cause of the noise was a "production" factor, then how to explain that the sound was heard in different parts of the planet almost simultaneously? The second drawback - if you believe, again, all the same eyewitnesses, then power lines, thermal power plants, factories, construction sites and other technical objects were far from always near the place where the "groan" was heard.
VERSION GEOPHYSICAL
Arthur Conan Doyle has a story called When the Earth Screamed. The hero of the story, Professor Challenger, decides to find out if the Earth is "alive". To do this, he drills a giant hole in it. And when the drill penetrated very deeply into the earth's strata, the planet … screamed.
In this story, only the ending is fantastic. For the rest, geophysicists are in solidarity with the writer - the Earth is indeed "alive", and it really "screams".
In the bowels of our planet, convection, the movement of magma flows and the displacement of lithospheric plates constantly occur. This leads to the fact that the Earth is noisy. And scientists learned how to record her "voices" long ago. To do this, they come to boreholes drilled for technical or scientific purposes, and put ultrasensitive microphones into them. The ordinary human ear is unable to hear this sound in most cases.
But there are also exceptions. They can occur, for example, during an earthquake, just before tremors. However, this is not surprising: during earthquakes, lithospheric plates move, so the process, of course, can be accompanied by strong noise.
It is noticed that before a large earthquake the level of the earth's hum rises sharply. The earth seems to warn of an impending earthquake and gives people the opportunity to estimate its strength in advance and localize the epicenter.
In fact, in the depths of the Earth, earthquakes never stop. But it is almost impossible to predict which of them will "burst" to the surface in advance. Aleksey Lyubushin, the chief researcher at the Schmidt Institute of Physics of the Earth, RAS, once succeeded. A major earthquake in Tohoku (Japan), which occurred in 2011 and killed at least 16,000 people, he predicted in as many as three years.
The fact that earthly noise under Japan began to synchronize (according to the scientist's hypothesis, this is the first sign of an impending powerful earthquake), Lyubushin noticed back in 2008 and published several warnings on this topic.
The Japanese did not believe it. The most unpleasant thing is that after the catastrophe, the synchronization of low-frequency noise was preserved. Alexei Lyubushin believes that Japan will face another earthquake, no less devastating, and its epicenter should be located not far from the country's capital - Tokyo. That is why the noise of the Earth can and should be studied. With their help, the planet not only reports earthquakes, but also helps, for example, to search for oil and other minerals.
But, alas, not all the "screams" of the Earth can be explained by impending earthquakes. After all, where they were supposedly heard in the last two years, no seismic events have ever happened! could not - often these were areas where they do not exist in principle.
WEATHER VERSION
Some scientists speculate that the planet's creak is related to the weather: fog, dampness and rain. When ice melts, part of the hydrogen bonds between water molecules breaks. Each gap releases energy and can produce a faint audible click. Therefore, according to the hypothesis of these scientists, if the noise is heard during fog or when there are clouds in the sky, this is the “song of water”, which can be accompanied by a hum. Of course, a single snowflake creates only minor noise, but when large amounts of ice melt, everyone can hear the sound.
Unfortunately, the version does not provide an answer to the question of why noises are heard in summer, in clear weather.
VERSION HELIOCENTRIC AND OTHER
It is adhered to by Professor, Doctor of Geological and Mineralogical Sciences, Chairman of the Board of the International Committee on Global Geological and Environmental Changes, President of the Global Network for Earthquake Forecasting (GNFE) Elchin Khalilov. He studied audio recordings of earth noise from different parts of the planet, and found that they are all remarkably similar. From this he concluded that the noise is a consequence of cataclysms on the Sun.
When streams of solar energy, after the next release, rush to the Earth and crash into the magnetosphere, this leads to the emergence of special acoustic waves, which then rush to the Earth's surface. These waves can only be heard with special instruments. However, some people are also able to hear them if the sound is superimposed on low-frequency city noise. A low-frequency wave changes the spectrum of city noise, and then a person can hear such an ominous "groan".
On audio recordings, one can hear that the hum is, indeed, similar to the usual city noise - of a crane, an aircraft, construction equipment - but amplified many times over. Elchin Khalilov explains that this sound often causes a feeling of panic among eyewitnesses by its low frequency. It is known that low frequencies, although not distinguished by the ear, have a bad effect on the human psyche. An example of this is the famous research of the French professor Gavreau, who established precisely at what frequencies of infrasound a person begins to rupture the eardrum, hemorrhage into the brain, and at which even death.
The negative influence of infrasound on the psyche was recently demonstrated by Dr. Richard Lord and Professor of Psychology Richard Wiseman, having organized an unusual concert of organ music in Liverpool Cathedral. In two of the four compositions, the sounds of a 7-meter organ specially designed for the experiment were added. The peculiarity of the giant instrument is that the sounds it makes have a frequency below 20 kHz, so the human ear is simply unable to hear them.
Thus, the volunteers who listened to the concert did not even know exactly when the organ began to play. Scientists managed to establish that among the negative sensations that appeared in people during organ play, there were fear, loss of strength and mood, sadness. Many had goose bumps.
In the 1960s of the last century, against the backdrop of a general upsurge in the economy, science and culture in our country, Soviet scientists conceived an ambitious project - drilling a well of unprecedented depth of 15 km. This project was supposed to mark another "psychological" victory over the United States. The victory of science was in learning more about the structure of the Earth.
The Americans also thought about the possibility of drilling such an ultra-deep well, but after weighing all the pros and cons, they decided that it was easier to fly to the moon. But the Russians, as usual, did not give up.
And on the Kola Peninsula, a well appeared with a depth of just over 12 km. Soviet scientists did not reach the declared level, but they broke the world record and got into the Guinness Book of Records. These tests literally and figuratively "undermined" all theories about the structure of the Earth that existed until then. It turned out, for example, that there is water even in the deepest layers of our planet, and the temperature at great depths turned out to be not at all as high as previously thought. There are many tales about the Kola well. One of them says that once geophysicists lowered a microphone there and clearly heard human screams, confirming that hell really exists.
It has long been known that infrasound inherently accompanies many natural phenomena: hurricanes, tsunamis, gusts of wind, noise of waves, volcanic eruptions, thunderstorms, sudden changes in pressure, etc. Poor health during fluctuations in atmospheric pressure is associated, among other things, and with infrasound, which is formed in the atmosphere.
According to one of the versions, the mysterious rumble is associated with the change of magnetic poles, which is now taking place on our planet. A psychologist from the University of Chicago, Neil Johnson, believes that the noise of the Earth is associated with the psychological characteristics of those people who hear it.
Researchers at Earthscope USArray have discovered a series of infrasonic noises generated when two ocean waves collide. The resulting sound from such collisions, in principle, can spread over the entire globe, so that the cause of the hum may not be the earth, but water.
There is also a version that the "sounds of the apocalypse" is just a massive hoax, a large-scale newspaper duck using fake videos to promote films such as "Red State" or "Alien Invasion: Battle of Los Angeles 2". The premieres of these films took place in 2011, almost immediately after the earthlings heard the “cry of the planet”. However, the human ability to present wishful thinking is also known, and the trait of many media outlets is the wishful thinking to be passed off as a sensation.
Such a number of hypotheses baffles a person who wants to find the only correct explanation for the sound of the planet. At least for now. Perhaps the groan of the Earth is really a multifactorial phenomenon, one way or another associated with each of these versions.
NAKED SCIENCE January, 2014
