Scientists Discover Weird Sounds In Antarctic Ice Shelf (usatoday.com) 40
pgmrdlm shares a report from USA Today: Using special instruments, scientists have discovered weird sounds at the bottom of the world. The noise is actually vibrating ice, caused by the wind blowing across snow dunes, according to a new study. It's kind of like you're blowing a flute, constantly, on the ice shelf," study lead author Julien Chaput, a geophysicist and mathematician at Colorado State University, said in a statement. Another scientist, glaciologist Douglas MacAyeal of the University of Chicago, likened the sounds to the buzz of thousands of cicadas. The sounds are too low in frequency to be heard by human ears unless sped up by the monitoring equipment. The scientists originally buried 34 seismic sensors under the snow on Antarctica's Ross Ice Shelf to study the continent's ice shelves -- not to record the sounds they heard. "Studying the vibrations of an ice shelf's insulating snow jacket could give scientists a sense of how it is responding to changing climate conditions," reports USA Today. "Changes to the ice shelf's 'seismic hum' could also indicate whether cracks in the ice are forming that might indicate whether the ice shelf is susceptible to breaking up."
Aliens (Score:3, Funny)
I saw a video on youtube which basically proved beyond a doubt that there are a loads of aliens there. Big alien caves and what not. Not sure what they are doing there, I assume that is where they plan their anal probes and cattle mutilations.
Likely this place has too weird even for them and the noise they hear the aliens startin' up their space ship an melting the ice. So, aliens are also responsible for all the meltin' ice too!!
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Mountains of Madness (Score:5, Informative)
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Nah, it's just walrus farts.
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Tekeli li! Tekeli li!
The shoggoths are obviously waking up due to the warmth.
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Sounds to me like "the thin, monotonous whine of blasphemous flutes from inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond Time".
Came here for the Lovecraftian reference posts. So glad I was rewarded.
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It's the plague of locusts. They've been waiting in the ice for countless millions of years — waiting for the right moment to wipe out all our food crops and begin the nuclear resource war to end all wars.
"too low in frequency to be heard by human ears" (Score:1)
This music is not for our ears.
Well... Who you gonna call? (Score:1)
When there's something strange...
but .... (Score:1)
drilling several dozen holes in it doesn't affect it at all.
I be willing to bet (Score:4, Interesting)
that if you made recordings anywhere the wind was blowing, and sped them up to a "frequency that we could hear", you'd hear sounds like this. Speeding up the recordings raises the lowest frequency stuff to audible range and pushes the normally audible stuff beyond audible range.
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I wonder what would be the sound of a suitcase full of $20 bills. I just need some funding.
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Probably not nearly as pleasant as the sound of a suitcase full of $100 bills.
Lovecraft predicted this (Score:2, Funny)
> It's kind of like you're blowing a flute, constantly, on the ice shelf
Phrased another way, they discovered a thin, monotonous piping coming from Antarctica.
I'm pretty sure that kind of thing ends with releasing all kinds of Lovecraftian gribblies.
Finale (Score:2)
No surprise (Score:3)
Anyone who has participated in Winter Camping and pitched their tent on a frozen lake will tell you that ice makes weird, other-worldly sounds all the time. For some reason it isn't obvious unless it's very quiet and you're trying to sleep, so daytime forays on the ice won't reveal them to you. So no sound involving ice, Antarctic or otherwise, would surprise me.
It's the unsound (Score:2)
Everyone who listens has a maximum of 1 year left after hearing.
Hello? (Score:2)
Old news (Score:1)