Terrifying ‘airquakes’ are being heard around the world, including the US – and scientists don’t know what they are
Mysterious ‘skyquakes’ have been heard around the world for more than 200 years, but scientists have yet to discover the cause and origin of the bizarre sounds.
The sounds can be mistaken for a gunshot or a car backfiring, and have been heard in areas ranging from Belgium and Japan to New York’s Finger Lakes region.
Scientists have tried to figure out where the thunderous booms come from, and have proposed theories such as a meteor exploding in the atmosphere, military exercises, quarry explosions and distant storms or earthquakes.
A strange airquake has rocked the world since the early 1800s, leading scientists to speculate about what might have caused it. They’ve considered earthquakes, military exercises and storm surges, but none seem to be the cause
The first air tremors were documented in 1811 after people in New Madrid, Missouri heard the strange noises during a magnitude 7.2 earthquake.
Residents reported hearing “artillery-like sounds” before or during the earthquake.
Similar sounds were subsequently reported during one earthquake in Charleston, South Carolina in August 1886, which was heard for weeks afterwards at a magnitude of 7.3.
The earthquakes were described them as a “roaring noise” or “loud explosions.”
These sounds are also called Lake Guns or Seneca Guns, after Seneca Lake in central New York State, where the phenomenon was also experienced in 1850.
James Fenimore Cooper, who lived in Seneca Lakes during one of these earthquakes, described the experience in his short story “The Lake Gun.”
βIt is a sound similar to the explosion of a heavy piece of artillery, which cannot be explained by any of the known laws of nature,β Cooper wrote.
‘The report is deep, hollow, distant and imposing. It seems as if the lake is speaking to the surrounding hills, which accurately send back the echoes of its voice.’
In the years that followed, the booms were unidentifiable due to their random timing and had no connection with other natural events.
Only in 2020 did scientists begin using seismic data acquired from the EarthScope Transportable Array (ESTA) since 2013.
ESTA is a network of more than 400 seismic stations in the US that detects earthquakes, volcanoes and landslides.
A team of researchers from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill compared ESTA data with news articles to determine whether the sounds were caused by earthquakes.
“Generally, we believe this is an atmospheric phenomenon β we don’t think it comes from seismic activity,” Eli Bird, a researcher involved in the study, told me. Living Science at the time.
‘We assume it propagates through the atmosphere and not through the ground.’
The researchers speculated that another possibility could be bolides: space rocks that explode when they hit Earth’s atmosphere.
Bird said another possibility could be oceanic events, such as large waves crashing offshore or thunder bursting over the ocean.
“The atmospheric conditions may be such that this is amplified in a particular direction, or mainly affects this localized area,” he told LiveScience.
However, despite their efforts, seismologists have still not been able to definitively determine where the airquakes are coming from.
Residents in 15 Alabama counties were shocked by a boom in November 2017, prompting them to call 911 operators out of fear.
The National Weather Service in Birmingham told people they could not clearly explain the sound and that satellite images and radar scans showed no signs of an explosion in the region.
The agency posted at