Inexplicable Seismic Waves Recorded Globally Baffle Geologists
On Nov. 11, a strange series of seismic waves rocked an area in the Mozambique channel near the French island territory of Mayotte. The waves were picked up by seismic instruments as far as 11,000 miles away in such places as Canada and Chile, reverberating for more than 20 minutes – except, no one actually felt them.
Geologists are at a loss to explain these bizarre wave clusters, which may have gone entirely undetected, had it not been for an amateur earthquake aficionado on Twitter who noticed the anomalies on the U.S. Geological Survey’s real-time seismogram displays.
“I don’t think I’ve seen anything like it,” Göran Ekström, a seismologist who specializes in unusual earthquakes at Columbia University, told National Geographic.
Twitter user @matarikipax, picked up on the epicenter of the tremors off the coast of Madagascar, before noticing subsequent recordings from seismograms in Kenya, Spain, and New Zealand.
According to geologists, one of the most confounding factors observed in these waves was their monotonous, low-frequency ring – possibly the reason they went undetected by anyone in the direct vicinity.
Typically, following an earthquake, there are several types of follow-up reverberations that resonate in varied oscillations. These, on the other hand, are what scientists call monochromatic – a singular zigzag on a 17-second loop.
The epicenter of the waves has seen significant seismic activity in the past, it is after all, a volcanic island in a volcanic archipelago. And typically, one would expect waves of this nature to follow a large earthquake, but scientists say there was no major seismic activity in the area leading to this particular event.
Geologists are still struggling to figure out the cause, with the most agreed upon possibility being that it may have been a magma reservoir below the Earth’s crust shaken by small earthquakes. But the precise intervals of the waves make it difficult to say anything for certain. And as Gizmodo pointed out, this type of regularity is typically caused by artificial means.
Unsurprisingly, this led to wild speculation in the conspiracy world, as well as some far-out responses from scientists themselves, including speculation about mythological monsters such as Cthulhu, or a previously undiscovered prehistoric creature.
“Submarine volcanism sounds most likely. However, isn’t that where the coelacanth was first found to be alive? I’m rooting for the event to be a giant prehistoric sea monster…” said one Twitter user.
But while most of the sea monster theories have been tongue-in-cheek, another interesting conspiracy has resurfaced related to a WikiLeaks article released in 2013, which alleged that a mysterious vortex opened over the Gulf of Aden just off the horn of Africa, creating catastrophic weather in the early aughts.
Now, the Gulf of Aden is in the same area of the world, though it’s not necessarily close to the Mozambique channel. If one were to fly from Djibouti to Madagascar it would be about a seven-hour flight. But we digress.
According to the report, allegedly prepared for Vladimir Putin by Russian Northern Fleet Admiral Nikolay Maksimov, the anomalous disturbance was reported in the Gulf of Aden in late 2000. This was supposedly when the U.S. established a base in the area in response to the report, before it issued a warning to other major powers. The response was reportedly covered up in the media with stories that naval forces were sent to the region to deal with Somali pirates terrorizing important shipping lanes.
The report goes on to claim the mysterious vortex posed an extraterrestrial or inter-dimensional threat to the planet and that opposing superpowers, including Russia and the United States, were set to join forces to defend humanity. Others have speculated that the portal could be the result of machinations at CERN or another particle collider, as a similar vortex was allegedly reported above Norway in 2009.
TL;DR: some conspiracy theorists believe the latest unexplained seismic waves may have something to do with the alleged Gulf of Aden Vortex.
Surely, this sounds absurd and the sources provided in the document to corroborate its claims are equally as sketchy. Many have also pointed out that it could be a piece written by a highly dubious and often fraudulent conspiracy theory site, before being widely disseminated under other aliases. But there are also some questions as to why it was published by WikiLeaks, which wouldn’t normally release something so fantastic.
As it turns out, the documents come from a private American intelligence firm called Stratfor, which provides global intel for large corporations, aerospace contractors, and even certain branches of the U.S. government.
This particular article, once possessed by Stratfor before being published by WikiLeaks, closes with a line that states, “to what is contained in the United States secret ‘Gulf of Aden Vortex’ file WikiLeaks has in its possession and is threatening to release, it is not in our knowing.”
Could WikiLeaks have more on the Gulf of Aden Vortex? Moreover, could there be any relation between the latest seismic waves and the Gulf of Aden Vortex? Or equally as conspiratorial, is the private intelligence firm Stratfor intentionally spreading disinformation? Could this all be explained by natural seismic phenomena? Quite possibly. We’ll need to do more serious digging.
Could Julian Assange and WikiLeaks hold the key to the Gulf of Aden Vortex files? Learn more about his tribulations in the documentary, Digital Dissidents:
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Scientists Propose Idea of Planetary Intelligence
Can planets possess their own intelligence? That’s what University of Rochester astrophysicist Adam Frank and his colleagues, have proposed in a paper published in the International Journal of Astrobiology.
They pulled ideas from the Gaia Hypothesis — that all living organisms on Earth interact with inorganic organisms to regulate the conditions necessary for life, making the planet a self-regulating organism.
They looked at how, “[T]he appearance of technological intelligence may represent a kind of planetary-scale transition, and thus might be seen not as something which happens on a planet but to a planet”
They argue that to understand the evolution of life, we must study the planet as a whole instead of individual species. Their definition of planetary intelligence is “the acquisition and application of collective knowledge, operating at a planetary scale, which is integrated into the function of coupled planetary systems.”
Consider photosynthesis: for the first two billion years, Earth’s atmosphere was mainly molecular nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and some oxygen. The evolution of photosynthesis by bacteria lead to the “great oxygenation event” about two and a half billion years ago.
