11 ms·
The Earth Is Pulsating Every 26 Seconds, and Seismologists Don't Agree Why
- bpatel576 6y agoIt's cause the earth just wants to party baby!
- senectus1 6y agoIts Peaking?
- rishabhd 6y agoWith our luck in 2020, it just might be Cthulhu's heartbeat.
- TeMPOraL 6y agoIndeed. When I saw the headline, my first thought was: it's 2020, so it's probably Earth itself about to rip apart into pieces come December.
- Izkata 6y agoI remember reading about this years ago, and someone mentioned the location does coincide with one of the creatures in the Cthulhu mythos, but not Cthulhu itself. Don't remember which one, though.
- somecommit 6y ago26 is certainly the most famous kaballistic number. As the gematria of the word "God" in hebrew https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gematria https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gematria
- mikeyanderson 6y agoWhen I looked this place up, there’s also a massive obelisk shaped pillar. This feels like a conspiracy theorists dream: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pico_C%C3%A3o_Grande?wprov=sfti1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pico_C%C3%A3o_Grande?wprov=sft...
- weare138 6y agoMake the Old Ones Great Again
- abhinai 6y agoWhy haven’t I heard about this before? This seems too important a detail for my school textbooks to have left out and for popular culture to lack any references to it whatsoever. What am I missing?
- segfaultbuserr 6y ago> For popular culture to lack any references to it whatsoever As the first paragraph of the article has mentioned, at least xkcd has a reference [0]. [0] https://xkcd.com/2344/ https://xkcd.com/2344/
- CamperBob2 6y agoThat's interesting, assuming the location in the comic is correct. It is very close to 0 degrees latitude, 0 degrees longitude. Many people who have built or used GIS applications are familiar with "Null Island." It should probably have been called "Bug Island." If you have bugs in your GIS code, this is where they tend to lurk.
- RobertoG 6y ago>>" It is very close to 0 degrees latitude, 0 degrees longitude." The 0 latitude could be relevant, but that the 0 longitude is in there is more an historical accident. The shape of the African continent is also interesting there.
- throwaway316943 6y agoThere appears to be a mountain range that runs straight into the ocean there. Oddly right in the middle of the bite. I wonder what that area looked like when ocean levels were lower.
- xaedes 6y agoI think the 0 longitude most likely is accidental. Yet, here is another thing to think about: Zero longitude is the longitude of Greenwich, i.e. London, a significant city through the ages. Cities and towns, especially ones with old age, aren't positioned randomly but in geographical suitable locations: valleys, rivers, coast, etc. Since the position of London is not random, the 0 longitude isn't totally random as well. Still seeing no connection to this 26s pulse tho.
- seg_lol 6y agoRinging left over from a meteor impact, or plate tectonics. If more earthquakes happen in phase with the pulsating, it would only increase the amplitude, forming a feedback loop. I'd look at earthquake phase data to see if they are "helping" the pulsating.
- soulofmischief 6y ago> The mystery surrounding the phenomenon even has its own XKCD web comic. This guy gets it. It's not legit until it has its own xkcd comic.
- jazzyjackson 6y agoReminds me of the signal in Independence Day.
- perryizgr8 6y agoFascinating! I wonder if the pulse is strong enough to show up on phone accelerometers. Would make for a nice project to be able to clean up the signal and try to pick up the pattern.
- imvetri 6y agoHaha. Pulses.
- imvetri 6y agoPulse is a sign of life.
- hugey010 6y agoNever heard of this, so I had to do some digging. My money is on this being an ocean wave phenomenon. The Gulf of Guinea, specifically the Bight of Bonny, is up to ~20,000ft deep. Average ocean waves have a period less than 15s and the average ocean depth of the Atlantic is ~11,000ft. Oddly similar ratios! So it's plausible this 26s wave period is caused by the increase in depth [0]. The abnormally large seismic amplitude can be similarly attributed, as pressure patterns conditionally form along the bottom of the ocean (in either direction) due to combined features of both the wave and the ocean bottom topography. [1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_wave#Physics_of_waves https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_wave#Physics_of_waves [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microseism#Generation_of_secondary_microseisms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microseism#Generation_of_secon...
- mucsun 6y agoNever heard of this either, but I don't agree with your theory, as waves usually form only superficial on the ocean.
- hugey010 6y agoThis is an unusual measurement which is unexplained by current models. This chart [0] helps show why and when waves are not superficial to only surface of the ocean. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microseism#/media/File:Interference_of_water_waves_with_bottom_topography,_relevant_for_microseism_generation.gif https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microseism#/media/File:Interfe...
- pa7x1 6y agoWave-depth and period are related, waves of 15s or even 26 are much too shallow to be affected by the seabed at those depths. EDIT: Some back of the envelope physics to see how plausible your hypothesis is: For deep water waves: wave_speed = gravity * wave_period / 2pi wave_speed (26 sec period) = 40.56 m/s wave_speed = wavelength / period => wavelength = 1054 m = 3458 ft. The effect of the seabed (i.e. shallow water wave physics) is usually taken into account at depths of the order 1/20 the wavelength. That is, when the depth is smaller than 1/20 the wavelength we have to start taking into account the effect of the seabed which makes the dispersion relation of waves non-linear and brings entirely new physics. Of course that 1/20 is not a magic number just a rough figure when the effects of the seabed start to be noticeable. Unfortunately, we are still off by several orders of magnitude so I would think the effect you describe is unlikely.
- dmitriid 6y agoThat's CPU cycles in the computer built to discover the the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything.
- forgotmypw17 6y agoRather slow clock rate in our perception, but not that bad if you're computing for millions of years.
- dmitriid 6y agoOr could be a pulse that triggers a series of layered switches.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- chopin 6y agoWorth one year of compute on a mediocre PC if my math doesn't fail me. Not that much for such a task. We tend to forget how fast modern computers are.
- sushshshsh 6y agoWhat's the minimum billable time unit if I want to run some serverless functions from your cloud service if the cycles are measured by the millions of years?
- aritmo 6y agoThanks to the article editor who did not do the common "The Earth is pulsating every 26 seconds and NOBODY KNOWS WHY."
- globular-toast 6y agoBut it's still "and <noun> <verb> why." Not very creative.
- air7 6y agoIt's still quite clickbate-y I'd say...
- st_goliath 6y agoAlso thanks for actually using the word seismologist instead of just calling them generic "scientists". Browsing through this website, it looks like Discover Magazine is a little bit more qualitative than the usual pop-science fluff sites. According to Wikipedia it was a 1980 Time Magazine spin-off that featured more in-depth reporting on scientific topics, but still aimed at a general audience and even had a column called "Skeptical Eye" that dissected the usual pop-science fluff making headlines elsewhere[1]. Sadly tough, since its inception it has changed hands several times (and had some interesting owners, including Disney) until it eventually went with the trend of dumbing things down. The "Skeptical Eye" column was dropped quite early on in favour of more controversial stuff that it used to be sceptical off, in hopes to drive up sales[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discover_(magazine) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discover_(magazine)
- FredFS456 6y agoI had a subscription to Discover a number of years ago. I'm sad to see that they've started dumbing things down.
- Zancarius 6y agoSame. I've not normally been interested in medicine, but I'd always read their Vital Signs section. It was almost always guaranteed to be captivating, even if the rest of the articles for the month weren't all that interesting. But to be honest, that downward trend has been going on across all major publications for decades.
- pulse7 6y agoCan this be used to measure time?
- est31 6y agoCould it be an underwater geysir? 26 seconds is right in the period length for a geysir. Maybe due to the higher pressure due to greater depth it has more of an "explosion" characteristic than traditional geysirs so that it causes a seismic event?
- joshocar 6y agoI don't think geysers really exist under the sea. The pressure would keep steam from forming and therefore stop a pressure build up. Every geothermal feature I have seen under the ocean has been a steady stream of superheated fluid. As an example, I took a temperature reading on one black smoker and it was 320°C and still fluid.
- nemacol 6y agoThis is super interesting. The area they have narrowed down is nearly in line with the mountain range that falls off into the ocean. The way ocean waves / currents hit the topology of that mountain range? Some geologic activity that is somehow more active when the ocean is more active? Hard to imagine anything to do with ocean waves and storms could be consistent enough to produce this effect. I understand there is some average wave periods but storms normally disrupt patterns. All very interesting.
- alex_duf 6y agoFunnily enough, it's also close to the 0,0 GPS coordinates https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/0°00'00.0"N+0°00'00.0"E https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/0°00'00.0"N+0°00'00.0"E
- iso1631 6y ago0°00'00.0"N+0°00'00.0"E Funny how it's N+E, not S+W
- codetrotter 6y agoWhy? The natural “up” direction is north, and east goes great with it like that’s where the sun comes up and also arrows pointing to N and E look like the coordinate axes in a default oriented graph.
- splitrocket 6y agoWhy is north "up"?
- krferriter 6y agoBecause some people hundreds and thousands of years ago drew it like that on maps, and people kept doing it that way for cross-compatibility reasons, and now it's a convention.
- Zancarius 6y agoAnd the best part is that it depends on culture. In ancient Hebrew, east was venerated for a variety of reasons and was given the distinction as "up" (although I'm not sure that distinction really maps to our concept of up). https://www.ancient-hebrew.org/philosophy/east-time-eternity-the-universe-and-the-origin-of-all-things.htm https://www.ancient-hebrew.org/philosophy/east-time-eternity...
- 6y ago
- RickJWagner 6y agoClearly it's a migraine.
- curiousllama 6y agoWith all these "scientists don't know why" articles, I always picture some scientist somewhere slacking off on HN and going "Is that..? shoot, my bad guys - didn't mean to do that" Like Tesla with his earthquake machine
- bsenftner 6y agoIt's the peck peck peck of the planet-scale baby bird almost ready to emerge from the Earth's crust.
- api 6y agoI was thinking Godzilla, but that's more likely.
- nottorp 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_the_World_Screamed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_the_World_Screamed
- kls 6y agoCan't help but evoke images in my mind of some mad scientist trying to recreate Tesla's Telegeodynamics. The concept of transferring power via seismic waves always fascinated me as a kid.
- tomkat0789 6y agoNobody's yet mentioned that there's another of these 26 second pulses with a source near Australia and New Zealand [1]. Pretty mysterious! http://ciei.colorado.edu/pubs/2006/3.pdf http://ciei.colorado.edu/pubs/2006/3.pdf
- major505 6y agoIs probably an hibernating Godzilla heartbeat.
- chrismeller 6y agoOr the Great Bird of the Galaxy, about to break out.
- simondw 6y agoYou think Gene Roddenberry is down there?
- chrismeller 6y agoOr at least Peter David...
- torstenvl 6y ago"Oh that? Don't worry about that. It's just a by-product of invoking the simulator GC periodically. Wouldn't want things to get too out of hand and have to stop the world LOLOL amirite?" EDIT: Ouch.
- liperuf 6y agoDharma Initiative. I'm pretty sure.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- mfer 6y agoIt would be great to see this written into something like a Godzilla film as a sleeping monsters heart beat.
- montagg 6y agoMy head canon, it’s Lavos.
- drawkbox 6y agoOr that Earth itself is alive or just a giant egg for a monster.
- ifdefdebug 6y agoI actually remember a SF short story where astronomers detected something looking like a giant bird coming from outer space into the solar system. It then approached Mars, the planet cracked open and a baby bird came out. Next, both birds started heading for Earth... and people started drilling in a desperate attempt to kill whatever was under their feet... Unfortunately I don't remember the author.
- xaedes 6y agoMarvels' Celestials also have this story: "Celestial Eggs within planets It was stated by the Celestial Madonna that Earth and many other worlds were implanted with a Celestial Egg/Embryo at their center, gestating for millions of years before birthing and consuming the planet. Similar processes was witnessed in Earth-9997 and other realities." https://marvel.fandom.com/wiki/Celestials_(Race)#Celestial_Eggs_within_planets https://marvel.fandom.com/wiki/Celestials_(Race)#Celestial_E...
- jonplackett 6y agoI thing J. J. Abrams is behind it.
- jonplackett 6y agoDid no-one else watch lost?
- tantalor 6y agoI see this phenomenon is called "seismic noise" in a couple places, but that can't be right; noise is by definition irregular (occurring at uneven or varying rates or intervals). This is actually a signal of something, we just don't know what.
- anamexis 6y agoBy which definition? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noise_(spectral_phenomenon) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noise_(spectral_phenomenon)
- arbitrage 6y agono. noise can be very much periodic. or have a pattern. you can view noise as a signal you don't want to receive right now. HDTV transmissions are noise to radio astronomers, etc.
- 1billionstories 6y ago"as above so below"
- ajfjrbfbf 6y agoRelevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2344/ https://xkcd.com/2344/
- shalabajser 6y agoIt looks like periodic geyser eruptions. Geyser eruption frequency is also (minutely) affected by atmospheric events like storms. In this case, the geyser-like structure is underground somewhere in the vicinity of the São Tomé volcano.
- shalabajser 6y agoIt looks like periodic geyser eruptions. Geyser eruption frequency is also (minutely) affected by atmospheric events like storms. In this case, the geyser-like structure is underground somewhere in the vicinity of the São Tomé volcano
- tomgimm 6y agoThe square root of 666 is; 25.80697580112788. You're welcome.