What's behind the mysterious, earth-shaking boom of the 'Seneca Guns'?
Enigmatic booming sounds called the "Seneca Guns" have reverberated off parts of coastal North Carolina for more than 150 years, with some powerful enough to rattle windows and vibrate buildings.
Now, scientists are using seismic data to pinpoint where the explosions come from and what causes them.
They presented their findings on Dec. 7 at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU), held virtually this year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. But spoiler alert: They haven't quite solved the mystery yet. ...
The name Seneca Guns comes not from North Carolina, but from Lake Seneca in upstate New York where a similar phenomenon occurred. The lake's ominous booming sounds, described in 1850 by the writer James Fenimore Cooper in his short story "The Lake Gun," had at the time been heard for centuries. ...
Though the Seneca Guns can cause ground shaking, the scientists didn't find any earthquake records that coincided with the events, effectively ruling out ground shaking as the cause of these booms.
"Generally speaking, we believe this is an atmospheric phenomenon — we don't think it's coming from seismic activity, we're assuming it's propagating through the atmosphere rather than the ground" ...
One atmospheric explanation could be bolides — space rocks that are traveling so fast when they hit Earth's atmosphere that they explode. Another possibility could be events that originate in the ocean, such as the crash of very large waves or thunder far offshore — "the atmospheric conditions could be such that that gets amplified in a particular direction, or is primarily affecting this localized area" ...
Signals associated with booming varied in length from about 1 second to nearly 10 seconds, with the station near Cape Fear picking up the most prominent signals. Anecdotally, the Cape Fear region is also known for having numerous Seneca Gun incidents. However, the sensor array wasn't dense enough to pinpoint where the signals were coming from, and more data will be required to trace these big bangs, the researchers wrote. ...