by Jacob VanGundy | Published
Ten years later, a mysterious sound was heard coming from the Mariana Trench. A strange sound, described by researchers as a “biotwang” was first heard from a deep-sea sinkhole in 2014, and scientists have speculated about its source for years. Recently, a stroke of luck and new AI technology allowed a team of marine artists to identify the sound.
The Mariana Trench “biotwang” is a strange, almost universal sound that combines sounds that people associate with animals and those that can be associated with animals. Beginning as a low, rumbling sound, it is followed by high-pitched sounds that sound mechanical to many. Lauren Hareel, a member of the team that uncovered the mystery, compared the loud noises to those made by the Enterprise. Star Trek.
The technology that helped solve the mystery of the Mariana Trench could be of great help to oceanographers working on other research.
Although many found the sounds coming from the Mariana Trench to sound unnatural, it was a common theory among oceanographers that they were the sounds of whales. Unfortunately, verifying that theory was incredibly difficult as it would have required researchers to observe the animals while they were experiencing the sound and link the two sounds together. At every opportunity, the team managed to do just that.
A lucky break led a research team working near the Mariana Trench to spot a group of Bryde’s whales. The strange whales were heard with a different sound, which the team recorded. There were a total of 10 whale sightings during the survey trip and sound was heard during all but one of the sightings, strongly linking the sighting to the sound.
Although many found the sounds coming from the Mariana Trench to sound unnatural, it was a common theory among oceanographers that they were the sounds of whales.
Of course, the research team did not immediately identify the sound of Bryde’s whales as the mysterious sound of the Mariana Trench. When the research team tried to look for similarities in the sound they faced a database of more than 200,000 hours of recordings. Ann Allen, one of the researchers who discovered this, says that when she was overwhelmed by the volume of data her father suggested she reach out to Google for help.
Ann Allen took her father’s advice and enlisted Google’s help in the project, which led to the final success of the Mariana Trench sound mystery. Using AI trained to convert sound files into spectrograms and then compare those results to find patterns, the team was able to link the whales to “biotwang.” AI tools have made it possible to make that connection, which would have taken hundreds of thousands of hours of manual comparison, a nearly impossible task.
The depth of the Mariana Trench remains mysterious in many ways, but the chilling sound of “biotwang” has finally been debunked.
The technology that helped solve the mystery of the Mariana Trench could be of great help to oceanographers working on other research. In addition to linking that number of whales with sounds from ten years ago, it helped the team to track their movements with other recordings of their sounds. That tracking ability can help scientists plan the impact of environmental factors on specific animals.
The depth of the Mariana Trench remains mysterious in many ways, but the chilling sound of “biotwang” has finally been debunked. A combination of hard work, new technology, and luck led to success, which could eventually help future oceanographers solve similar mysteries much faster. Google has made the AI tool that detects sound open source, which means that the next time a mysterious sound is picked up from the depths, researchers will have a new way to track down its source.
Source: Scientific American
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