“A single event can awaken within us a stranger totally unknown to us. To live is to be slowly born.” - Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Many purported explorers have professed that one of the few last great mysteries of the universe is the Ocean itself, and whilst most conventional thinkers would deny this claim, there is no doubt that the depths of our own terrestrial world will continue to reap some fairly interesting zoological discoveries for years to come. And as science unravels the great mysteries of existence – the marvel of genetics, the origins of the stars and how Gary Busey has managed to not combust in the last twenty years of his growing insanity – it’s somewhat comforting to know that there are still some things that mankind doesn’t have the foggiest idea about.

So what is this Bloop?

During the height of Cold War, the United States Navy constructed a large number of underwater monitoring devices in order to detect Soviet nuclear submarines; in fact these devices were considered so sensitive that they could pick up the drunken ramblings of Boris Yeltsin from the heart of Moscow. The most common of these surveillance devices, the hydrophone, were placed at roughly three to four thousand mile intervals in the depths of the oceans, where the cold temperatures, high pressures and zero interference from large structures and vessels would allow sound waves to propagate greater distances with greater clarity. Following the fall of the Berlin wall, rather than dismantling the Sound Surveillance System (SOSUS), the Navy lent the Cold War relic to aid the global community of scientists.

The array has since been used to track and record many fascinating undersea events, such as the mass migrations of many aquatic species, undersea quakes, tsunamis, the formation of entire islands and the melting of the Antarctic ice. But one sound captured by the collective array of SOSUS hydrophones has the entire world baffled. The colloquially known bloop itself meets the criterion of identifying and classifying a living creature, but for any individual organism to create such a sound it would have to be significantly larger than the largest animal to ever live, the blue whale. In fact it fits the criterion so closely that many researchers are convinced that its origin has to be animal in nature; yet in order for a marine organism to emit a frequency that can travel over three thousand miles and produce such a clear and distinct sound through Earth’s noisy oceans, zoology experts say that it would need an implausibly hefty vocal apparatus, one much larger than that of the blue whale.

Most of the sounds detected obviously emanate from whales, ships or earthquakes, but some very low frequency noises have proved puzzling. Scientists believe many of these given names such as Train, Whistle, Slowdown and Upsweep can be explained by ocean currents, volcanic activity, or the movement of Antarctic ice. Bloop, however, remains a tantalizing mystery.

The sound, detected several times during the summer of 1997, originated off the South American southwest coast at about 50° S 100° W (the supposed location of Cthulhu, according to Lovecraft). Each time that it was recorded the ultra-low frequency sound rose rapidly in frequency over about one minute, and had sufficient amplitude to be heard on multiple sensors from over several thousand miles away. Perplexed, the oceanographic researchers who had recorded the frequency, unable to identify any possible source for the sound, christened it as “The Bloop.”

Some have suggested that giant squids could be responsible for the sound, but that is unlikely considering that no known species of Squid have the gas-filled sac necessary to reach such great volumes, or have even been recorded at such a scale as to generate such volumes. Indeed researchers have not recorded any organism within the known fossil record with nearly enough size to house the organs needed to produce the level of output demonstrated by the Bloop in such order. Unless this mystery creature uses some unknown and yet unseen mechanism to generate such an unfeasibly great sound, it is presumed to be an incredibly massive organism, considered physically impossible by any known law of biology. Further study of the Bloop is fraught by the fact that it has not been heard since the first recording. Could it just be that every one of the thousands of hydrophones displaced throughout the ocean simply malfunctioned at once? Or could there be something down there?

It is almost certain that unseen creatures still lurk in the deep and dark oceans, creatures which are strange and fascinating to us land dwelling beasts; in fact only just two years ago a rare Shark was seen to emerge off Japanese coastal waters, granting biologists the chance to view an active specimen at close range. Such an unknown animal may have articulated this noise while enduring at an unusually shallow depth. Unless researchers encounter the sound again, there is little chance that we’ll have any explanation more concrete than scientific speculation. But given its unusual properties and strong indications of a large biological origin, it makes for a compelling mystery. Could this be the famed Cthulhu of Lovecraft lore? The titled beast of the Cloverfield feature film? Or could it be that Metallica has discovered a new aquatic demographic?

I guess we’ll know when the film finally comes out.