B L O O P

- SUBOCEANIC ANOMALIES -

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HYDROPHONE ARRAY ALIGNED. LISTENING...

In 1997, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) detected an ultra-low-frequency underwater sound. It was picked up by the Equatorial Pacific Ocean autonomous hydrophone array—a network of underwater microphones originally designed by the military to track Soviet submarines.

The sound, dubbed The Bloop, was tracked across multiple sensors over a range of 5,000 kilometers (3,100 miles). The audio profile resembled that of a living creature. It possessed the rapid variation in frequency typical of marine animal vocalizations.

THE PROBLEM:

To be heard over a distance of 5,000 kilometers, the source of the sound had to be exponentially louder than the calls of a blue whale, the largest known animal on Earth.

NOAA officially stated years later that the sound was consistent with an icequake—a massive iceberg cracking and breaking away from an Antarctic glacier. But acousticians who originally analyzed the data were skeptical. The organic curvature of the spectrogram didn't match the mechanical snapping of ice.

Coordinates of origin: 50°50'S 100°0'W.
Roughly 1,500 nautical miles west of the southern Chilean coast.
By sheer coincidence, H.P. Lovecraft placed the sunken city of R'lyeh, prison of Cthulhu, at 47°9'S 126°43'W.

Just a few hundred miles away.

They tell us it was ice. But we only mapped 5% of the ocean floor. We have no idea what breathes in the abyssal plains.

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