Last month we posted about The Great Gloucester Sea Serpent of 1817.    Eric, a blog reader, commented, no doubt tongue in cheek, “So that is what the bloop was.”  His comment got me thinking about the ironies of observations, technology and the unknown.

For the uninitiated, the “bloop” was an ultra-low frequency underwater sound detected by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) several times during the summer of 1997.  NOAA was using an acoustic hydrophone array in the Pacific ocean originally developed by the US Navy to track Russian submarines.  The ”bloop” was heard on multiple sensors over a range greater than 5,000 km.  The sound appeared to be somewhere around 50° S 100° W (in the Pacific of the southwest coat of South American).  Scientists agreed that the bloop matches the audio profile of a living animal, but no known animal could have produced the sound.  Also given the range across which the sound was heard, any animal that created such a sound would have to be significantly larger than a blue whale, the largest creature ever know to have lived on the planet.

Tuning in to a deep sea monster

Since 1977, there have been no further observations of the “bloop”.

So what does this mean if anything and what does it have to do with the Gloucester Sea Serpent?  Nothing really, except that unlike the visual observations of the sea serpent, the “bloop” was recorded electronically several times over a range of widely dispersed hydrophones.   We may not know what the data means but we do have the data.  The sea serpent, on the other hand, was observed by numerous witnesses over the summer of 1817 and the years which followed but we have nothing other than their verbal accounts to rely on.   Imagine how this discussion might have changed if there had been cell phone cameras in 1817.

I am not making an argument here for or against sea serpents or the “bloop.”   I am only standing in wonder, reminded by how little we really know of the sea.   This summer, a researcher reviewing tapes from a hydrophone array off Long Long Island, New York, discovered that over the winter a blue had been singing not far off approaches to New York harbor.  The array had been set up to track right whales and the appearance of the blue whale was completely unexpected.

Will the sea serpent or the “bloop” reappear? Or will it be something else, entirely unexpected?  How little we know of the 7/8ths of this planet beneath the waves is humbling indeed.