The source of the mysterious 'ocean buzzing' may have finally been discovered
If you aren't terrified by the ocean, you're not thinking deep enough.
No, actually, look how deep it is:
Image: Iambored.com
And that depth is just an estimate. The ocean is actually SO deep we aren't even sure how deep it is.
It's no wonder, then, that there's some stuff going on down there we can't exactly explain. One of them being the mysterious "ocean buzz" -- a low and constant humming noise that can be heard deep in the Pacific Ocean that remained unexplainable.
Until now.
Take a deeper look into the Mariana Trench:
New research from the University of California, San Diego, suggests that the buzz could be a "dinner bell" for smaller organisms like bony fish to signal that it's dark enough to safely ascend closer to the surface to feed; alternatively, it tells them when to descend back down.
Larger marine animals like dolphins and whales are known to communicate with each other this way, but this argument suggests that smaller animals which reside deep in the water do as well.
Using acoustic measurement instruments to record the ocean's sounds during the daily periods of up and down travel, the team found a three to six decibel increase in noise compared to the norm.
As one of the scientists, Dr. Simone Baumann-Pickering, describes, "It's not that loud, it sounds like a buzzing or humming, and that goes on for an hour to two hours, depending on the day."
While this explanation has a lot of evidence to back it up, Baumann-Pickering also admits to a less glamorous albeit equally plausible explanation for ocean buzz: It could be the sounds of fish emitting gas to change their vertical positioning in the water.
Yep. A mystery scientists have puzzled over for several years could have, in fact, been fish farts all along.
More about the ocean:
Looking to the ocean floor for new antibiotics
Report: Ocean's plastic waste will outweigh fish by 2050
7 mindblowing facts you never knew about our oceans
