Strange Sounds Stump Clintonville
The solar wind is 377.8 km/sec. There are four sunspots, not so much clusters at this time, and 1445 is crackling with C Class Flares. Sunspot cluster AR1429, the source of so many strong flares and geomagnetic storms earlier this month, is still erupting. The active region produced a significant coronal mass ejection on March 24th but it is pointed away from earth at this time.
On Tuesday, March 27th, between midnight and 5 am EDT, NASA plans a rapid-fire launch of five sounding rockets from the Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. The rockets will deliver a chemical tracer to the upper reaches of Earth's atmosphere, forming milky white plumes that reveal high-speed winds at the edge of space. The display should be visible to the naked eye from coastal areas between South Carolina and New Jersey.
Strange sounds stump Clintonville
No explanation found for large booms
Updated: Tuesday, 20 Mar 2012, 10:28 AM CDT
Published : Monday, 19 Mar 2012, 11:28 AM CDT
· Reporter: Bill Miston
CLINTONVILLE - Residents in a Waupaca County community say they are puzzled by some explosion-like sounds.
There are still really no answers in Clintonville about whom or what caused the loud booms people say they heard Sunday night and into the morning.
The police department started getting calls shortly before 2 a.m. from people saying their homes were rattling and shaking. The calls focused on the northeast area of the city.
Both Clintonville city leaders and residents say they are confused.
"It was kind of like constant boom, boom, boom!” said resident Joseph Clauson. "And you could feel like the ground shaking beneath you and whatnot.”
"It almost felt like a heavy duty thunderstorm, but it was shaking though,” said resident Al Miller.
"And we both just started searching the house,” said resident Lindsay Pockat.
Police, fire and utility crews first looked for obvious causes, like elevated gas levels in manholes and sewers. But city officials say nothing was out of the ordinary. Now they are looking at other possibilities.
"We've talked to meteorologists, geologists. We've talked to our county and the counties around, seeing if people have explosive permits,” said Clintonville City Administrator Lisa Kuss.
The city did confirm there are no mining or explosive companies working in the area.
While the calls for the noises started late Sunday night and early Monday morning, Art Bassette says he's heard the same noises over the last couple months.
"But it would be just one loud clap and I just thought somebody's playing. Some kids had some firecrackers and didn't know what to do with themselves. I don't know. I don't think anybody else knows, do they?” said Bassette.
City officials say they believe the public is safe.
Kuss says she talked with the United States military. Military officials say they have nothing going on in the area which would cause the booming sounds.
Mysterious booming sounds are occasionally heard on the North Carolina coast, often powerful enough to rattle windows and doors. They cannot be explained by thunderstorms or any manmade sources — their source is a mystery.
Such dins are not unique to North Carolina or themodernage. People living near Seneca Lake in upstate New York have long known ofsimilar booming sounds, which they called “Seneca guns.” In coastal Belgium, they are known as “mistpouffers,” or fog belches; in the Ganges delta and the Bay of Bengal, “Bansal guns;” in the Italian Apennines, “brontidi,” or thunder-like; and by the Harami people of Shikoku, Japan, “yan.”
“What’s going on is an interesting challenge, whatever it might be,” said seismologist David Hill, scientist emeritus at the U.S. Geological Surveyofficein Menlo Park, Calif.
Long list of explanations
A host of plausible explanations may now exist for these enigmas, including earthquakes, rock bursts,mud volcanoes, explosive venting of gas, storm-driven waves, tsunamis, meteors, distant thunder and so-called booming sands.
“It seems there is quite a range of processes in nature that might be responsible,” Hill told OurAmazingPlanet.
“Earwitnesses” described sounds like booming cannons or falling stones accompanying small to moderate earthquakes in England from 1880 to 1916. In 1975, U.S. Geological Survey researchers managed to record both acoustic and seismic signals of an earthquake swarm in California, finding that three earthquakes with magnitudes ranging from 2.0 to 2.8 produced sounds that began within 0.02 seconds of the arrival of seismic waves at the scientists’ station. Similar results were seen with quakes in the French Pyrenees in 2004.
All in all,audible sounds from earthquakesmight be perceived even when shaking is not, Hill suggested. For instance, while earthquakes are rare in coastal North Carolina, they are relatively common in the Charleston area of South Carolina, the site of the 1886 magnitude 7.6 Charleston quake, and the Catskill Mountains that Seneca Lake is located within do host low-level earthquake activity. Locals could be hearing an earthquake that is too small for them to feel.
Also, rock bursts, where long-buried rock can suddenly release stress, often because of mining removing confining material above it, can essentially be seen as a type of small, near-surface earthquake. Scientists have reported feeling perceptible jolts and hearing sharp booming sounds from such bursts, Hill said.
Giant waves might also be responsible for the mystery sounds, Hill suggested. Scientists have found that booming sounds are apparently familiar to big-wave surfers during extreme waves. In addition, after the catastrophic2004 magnitude 9.1 Sumatra earthquake and tsunami, multiple witnesses said they heard loud, offshore booming sounds closely accompanying two or three of the largest waves that struck the coast at any given site.
“I was surprised tolearnabout the possibility that tsunamis produce these kinds of sounds,” Hill said. “I don’t think anyone understands that process.”
Hill suggests the sounds heard off the coasts of North Carolina, Belgium and the Bay of Bengal might be large waves caused by distant storms that break well offshore, beyond outer banks or barrier beaches. Such waves might also disrupt offshore methane hydrate deposits, leading to explosive venting of high-pressure gas trapped deep within the Earth.
Booming sands and seismometers
Another possibility is meteors.Meteors can generate sonic boomsand explode dramatically as they plummet from space. Given how long it can take a shockwave to reach the Earth’s surface from the upper atmosphere, visible signs of the meteor can vanish before its sonic boom is heard, especially during the daytime, Hill noted.
Under the right circumstances, evensand dunes can generate a variety of sounds, including whispering, humming, whistling and squeaking. Booming sands, comparable to rumbling thunder, can be heard to distances of 6 miles and for as long as 15 minutes, are possible as well. They generally appear limited to large sand dunes in arid climates with steep faces pointing away from the wind, and seem to require loosely packed, very smooth, almost spherical sand grains.
“In the eastern desert in Egypt, the Bedouins have a long history of hearing booms and avoiding that area — after installing seismometers there, researchers were able to go back and see these sounds seem correlated with small earthquakes that caused booming sands,” Hill said.
In the future, after potential artificial sources of mysterious booming sounds are ruled out, such as military exercises and quarry blasts, seismic networks could quickly reveal if earthquakes or volcanoes were responsible. For instance, theUSArray, a mobile network of seismometers, is currently moving east across the United States and “it might help resolve the issue of what the sounds on the North Carolina coast are,” Hill said.
Hill detailed thisresearchin the September-October issue of the journal Seismological Research Letters.
USGS: Micro-quake near Wis. city bothered by booms
By DINESH RAMDE
Associated Press
AP Photo/Carrie Antlfinger
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MILWAUKEE (AP) -- A minor earthquake occurred this week near the eastern Wisconsin city where researchers have been investigating a series of unexplained booming sounds, federal geologists said Thursday.
The U.S. Geological Survey said the 1.5-magnitude earthquake struck Tuesday just after midnight in Clintonville, a town of about 4,600 people about 40 miles west of Green Bay.
Geophysicist Paul Caruso told The Associated Press that loud booming noises have been known to accompany earthquakes. It's possible the mysterious sounds that town officials have been investigating are linked to the quake, he said.
Earthquakes can generate seismic energy that moves through rock at thousands of miles per hour, producing a sonic boom when the waves come to the surface, Caruso said.
"To be honest, I'm skeptical that there'd be a sound report associated with such a small earthquake, but it's possible," he said.
Those reservations didn't stop Clintonville City Administrator Lisa Kuss from declaring "the mystery is solved" at a news conference Thursday evening.
She said USGS representatives described the event as a swarm of several small earthquakes in a very short time.
"In other places in the United States, a 1.5 earthquake would not be felt," she said. "But the type of rock Wisconsin has transmits seismic energy very well."
The U.S. Geological Survey says earthquakes with magnitude of 2.0 or less aren't commonly felt by people and are generally recorded only on local seismographs. Caruso said the Tuesday earthquake was discovered after people reported feeling something, and geologists pored through their data to determine that an earthquake did indeed strike.
Local residents have reported late-night disturbances since Sunday, including a shaking ground and loud booms that sound like thunder or fireworks.
City officials investigated and ruled out a number of human-related explanations, such as construction, traffic, military exercises and underground work.
Clintonville resident Jordan Pfeiler, 21, said she doubted an earthquake caused the noises. She said the booms she experienced were in a series over the course of several hours and not continuous as she might have expected if they were caused by an earthquake.
Still, she said, "It's a little scary knowing Clintonville could even have earthquakes."
Steve Dutch, a geologist at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, said a 1.5 magnitude earthquake produces the energy equivalent of 100 pounds of explosives and could produce loud sounds.
But he was reluctant to describe Tuesday's event as an earthquake, saying the term is generally used to refer to widespread stress in the earth's crust. What happened in Wisconsin could be near the surface, perhaps caused by groundwater movement or thermal expansion of underground pipes, he said.
Still, Dutch said it was possible that the event could produce a series of sounds over time.
"If you've got something causing a little bit of shifting underground, it may take a while for whatever is causing it to play itself out," he said
Caruso, the U.S. Geological Survey scientist, said Tuesday's event was confirmed as an earthquake because it registered on six different seismometers, including some as far as central Iowa.
Jolene Van Beek, 41, had been jarred awake several times by late-night rumbling this week. When asked by telephone Thursday whether she thought the noises were caused by an earthquake, she joked that she was at a nearby lake "waiting for the tsunami to hit."
"Anything to do with earthquakes is going to freak people out," she said. "You'd never expect it in Wisconsin."
1000’s of New Agers Descend Upon Mountain Called Noah’s Ark.
A mountain looming over a French commune with a population of just 200 is being touted as a modern Noah's Ark when doomsday arrives – supposedly less than nine months from now.
A rapidly increasing stream of New Age believers – or esoterics, as locals call them – have descended in their camper van-loads on the usually picturesque and tranquil Pyrenean village of Bugarach. They believe that when apocalypse strikes on 21 December this year, the aliens waiting in their spacecraft inside Pic de Bugarach will save all the humans near by and beam them off to the next age.
As the cataclysmic date – which, according to eschatological beliefs and predicted astrological alignments, concludes a 5,125-year cycle in the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar – nears, the goings-on around the peak have become more bizarre and ritualistic.
For decades, there has been a belief that Pic de Bugarach, which, at 1,230 metres, is the highest in the Corbières mountain range, possesses an eery power. Often called the "upside-down mountain" – geologists think that it exploded after its formation and the top landed the wrong way up – it is thought to have inspired Jules Verne's Journey to the Centre of the Earth and Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Since the 1960s, it has attracted New Agers, who insist that it emits special magnetic waves.
Further, rumours persist that the country's late president François Mitterrand was transported by helicopter on to the peak, while the Nazis, and, later, Israel's Mossad, performed mysterious digs there. Now the nearby village is awash with New Agers, who have boosted the local economy, though their naked group climbs up to the peak have raised concerns as well as eyebrows. Among other oddities, some hikers have been spotted scaling the mountain carrying a ball with a golden ring, strung together by a single thread.
A grizzled man wearing a white linen smock, who calls himself Jean, set up a yurt in the forest a couple of years ago to prepare for the earth's demise. "The apocalypse we believe in is the end of a certain world and the beginning of another," he offers. "A new spiritual world. The year 2012 is the end of a cycle of suffering. Bugarach is one of the major chakras of the earth, a place devoted to welcoming the energies of tomorrow."
Upwards of 100,000 people are thought to be planning a trip to the mountain, 30 miles west of Perpignan, in time for 21 December, and opportunistic entrepreneurs are shamelessly cashing in on the phenomenon. While American travel agents have been offering special, one-way deals to witness the end of the world, a neighbouring village, Saint-Paul de Fenouillet, has produced a wine to celebrate the occasion.
Jean-Pierre Delord, the perplexed mayor of Bugarach, has flagged up the situation to the French authorities, requesting they scramble the army to the tiny village for fear of a mass suicide. It has also caught the attention of France's sect watchdog, Miviludes.