Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn (In his house at R’lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming)

H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu

This unpronounceable phrase is familiar to all readers of Howard Phillips Lovecraft. It refers to one of those supratemporal cosmic entities that feature in his fantastical tales, a primordial being that has lain dormant at the bottom of the sea for eons, waiting for its worshippers to awaken it.

Specifically in R’lyeh, a submerged city of impossible architecture that the American writer placed south of the Pacific, near the so-called pole of inaccessibility (that is, the point in the ocean farthest from any landmass).

Of course, R’lyeh does not exist; it is a fictitious place born from Lovecraft’s fertile imagination almost a century ago (The Call of Cthulhu was first published in the magazine Weird Tales in 1928), but to locate it, Lovecraft gave fairly precise geographical coordinates – later slightly altered by other followers within his circle – namely, 126° and 34′ longitude by 47° and 9′ latitude. These coordinates happen to coincide quite closely with the origin of some strange low-frequency sound waves detected in 1997 and left unidentified.

Dubbed The Bloop, they were picked up by the SOSUS (Sound Surveillance System), an array of hydrophones (underwater devices that convert sound into electricity, much like a microphone does in the air) spanning the Pacific Ocean, tasked with monitoring undersea seismic activity, ice noise, and the population and migration of marine mammals. This system is a civilian scientific version of what the US Navy used to detect and track Soviet submarines.

In this case, it was operated by the PMEL (Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory), a part of NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), a scientific agency within the US Department of Commerce dedicated to monitoring oceans and the atmosphere to issue warnings about hazardous weather conditions, produce nautical and celestial charts, provide guidance on the use and protection of oceanic and coastal resources, and conduct studies to improve environmental understanding and management.

So, on May 19, 1997, during a maintenance operation on the hydrophones, a powerful and rare sound was detected about five thousand kilometers from the southern coast of Chile.

Possible locations of The Bloop
Possible locations of The Bloop. Credit: Nojhan / Wikimedia Commons

The coordinates for the origin of The Bloop were pinpointed to an indeterminate point within an area located at 50° South-100° West, at the southern tip of South America. It was a sound intense enough for scientists to give it special consideration and even a name, but it was never heard again. Then, five years later, the time came to attempt an identification, which proved difficult because none of the initial hypotheses were satisfactory. Submarines and other man-made objects were ruled out from the beginning.

Due to its characteristics, animal origin was considered, given the frequency variations. The first proposal was a giant squid, albeit of an unknown species since no cephalopod is known to emit sounds; ultimately, this was ruled out due to lack of evidence. Attention then turned to the song of some type of cetacean larger than the blue whale; however, the existence of a new baleen whale is improbable, as being mammals, they need to surface periodically to breathe, and all species are already known, thus this option was also discarded.

Spectrogram of The Bloop
Spectrogram of The Bloop. Credit: Public domain / Wikimedia Commons

However, literature and science are different realms; and, joking aside, The Bloop remained a mystery for some years until, in 2012, the NOAA Vents Program established that its spectrogram bore a striking resemblance to that of a large cryoseism. Also known as an icequake, it involves a seismic event that can be caused by a sudden crack in frozen ground or saturated rock, whether by water or ice.

When water seeps into the ground, it can eventually freeze and expand under colder temperatures, generating tension in its surroundings that is explosively discharged as tremors. There can also be an alternative mechanism: sudden glacial movements caused by an underlying layer of water that, due to hydraulic pressure, acts as a lubricant, facilitating glacier movement. Cryoseisms are usually brief and intense, detectable thousands of kilometers away.

Scheme of ice calving process in a glacier
Scheme of ice calving process in a glacier. Credit: The Potsdam Parallel Ice Sheet Model (PISM-PIK) – Part 1: Model description. In: The Cryosphere / Wikimedia Commons

Acoustic emissions from ice calving, the sudden breaking of large ice masses (glaciers, icebergs), also abound, when a fractured layer slides off the main body into the sea, much like a fault line underground; we often see this in tourist videos of the Perito Moreno glacier. These emissions propagate as S waves, also known as shear, cutting, or elastic waves, and sound similar to bubbles in a fluid.

In conclusion, there is now scientific consensus that The Bloop‘s origin lies with ice, not with some unknown species of animal that would delight cryptozoologists. Nor is it the work of the Great Cthulhu, who continues to slumber, awaiting the moment when his faithful open the Necronomicon and read the passages that will awaken him to reclaim dominion over the world.

This article was first published on our Spanish Edition on October 24, 2023. Puedes leer la versión en español en The Bloop, el misterioso sonido detectado en el punto del océano Pacífico más alejado de tierra

Sources

NOAA, What is The Bloop? | PMEL. Acoustics Program, Icequakes (Bloop) | H.P. Lovecraft, La llamada de Cthulhu | Wikipedia

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