You know what they say that nature always gets even, and we better thing really serious about that considering all the bad things that humans are doing to it. Scientists could recently listen to volcanoes literally growling under the sea, and the sound can produce shivers to anyone. It’s like mother nature is warning us that all Hell will break loose soon if we continue to mess around with it.
The Bogoslof volcano erupted in 2017 with tremendous force, sending ashes 7 miles above the sea level. The volcano remained active for nine months, which was enough time for the observatory’s microphone to pick up a strange and frightening sound that repeated itself over 250 times.
“Instead of happening very fast and with high frequencies, which is typical for explosive eruptions, these signals were really low frequency, and some of them had periods up to 10 seconds,” said John Lyons, a geophysicist at the Alaska Volcano Observatory.
But what exactly caused those odd sounds? Finding a good answer has been a difficult mission for months. But one of Lyons’ colleagues found a striking description of the ocean’s surface during another eruption of the same volcano from 100 years ago, observed from a Navy ship.
Lyons and his teammates started to wonder if the mysterious signals could correspond to huge bubbles of gas-forming just under the surface. They managed to model the sounds of the overpressurized gas bubbles, being inspired by studies of bubbles of magma from the Stromboli volcano in Italy, which emitted similar sounds.
The final outcome of the research was that submerged volcanic explosions could sure produce Capitol dome-sized bubbles. The bubbles from the Bogoslof eruption have been estimated to be huge: 100 to 440 meters in diameter.
“It’s hard to imagine a bubble so big, but the volumes of gas that we calculated to be inside the bubbles are similar to the volumes of gas that have been calculated for explosions,” said Lyons. “Take the big cloud of gas and ash that’s emitted from a volcano and imagine sticking that underwater. It has to come out somehow.”
The results have been published in the journal Nature Geoscience on Monday.
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