Imagine that you are walking along one of those virgin beaches, not at all crushed by tourism, or along a cliff of the ones we have in the Cantabrian Sea and, suddenly, you hear like a cannon shot coming from the sky . There is no doubt that you will be startled, but do not think that you are before the announcement of the Last Judgment. By the way, that would only be understood by 30% of the world’s population, which is the one that declares itself Christian; for the remaining 70%, the trumpets of the apocalypse literally bring them to a hail.
The question is more difficult than we think. Of those explosions that the French call mistpouffers , the Italians marine or brontidi , uminari in Japan or rumbles in South America , and that are usually heard along the coasts of half the world, we do not know practically everything. It is thought that they must be related to the sea as it is common to hear them in coastal areas, but they are also heard in the interior. We have references to those explosions from the late 1800s and there is still no explanation.
But it is not the only sound that comes from heaven. Sometimes you don’t hear explosions but things like this in Canada, or this in Germany. It is the so-called hum, a low-frequency sound that not all of us can hear . And not just anywhere: only in quiet neighborhoods and rural areas. One of the most famous is the hum of Taos in New Mexico. This eerie sound has a frequency between 32 and 80 Hz, and is only audible to 2% of the population.
But of all the mysterious sounds that we can hear on the planet, none is more mesmerizing than the musical sands of some deserts: sounds of horns, bells, growls, even barks. Although there are some explanations – this video explains how to ‘create’ that sound if you locate a ‘singing dune’ – no one has been able to explain convincingly what makes it sound like a bark in one place and like the god Aeolus’s flute in another. . The musical arenas represent a peculiar (and not studied) by-product of geology.
All these are just a few examples of the sonic mysteries that our planet holds.
