Scientists Recorded an Eerie Sound Similar to a 'Woman’s Voice' Deep in the Pacific Ocean

The teeming mystery in the great depths of the world’s five oceans has been a subject of utmost fascination for scientists and the public, alike. The enigmatic nature of oceans remains unmatched with over 80% of it yet to be explored. Julia could be the name of any person you know, but one might not imagine her singing deep inside the ocean at night. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) captured a spine-chilling sound from the deep ends of the eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean and decided to call it “Julia”, per the PMEL Acoustics Program by NOAA.

The sound was picked up on March 1, 1999, by a series of hydrophones installed on the oceanbeds. These are instruments that are equipped to detect sound waves even in the high-pressures of the deep underwater. The sound, as shared in a YouTube video (@wowforreeel), resembles the voice of a woman humming or mumbling, and was captured by a range of hydrophones spaced hundreds of kilometers apart. Therefore, it could not have been a deep-sea creature as it would be impossible for the creature to emit a sound that powerful.

The oceanic administration could not discover the exact source of the sound but suggested that it was most likely a “large iceberg that ran aground off Antarctica.” The point of origin was pinned somewhere between Branfield Strait and Cape Adare in east Antarctica. There have been several other similar instances recorded on the hydrophones. Before the rare Julia caught the world in frenzy, another deep sound named “Bloop” was the subject of peak fascination, discovered in 1997 somewhere off the coast of Chile. It was marked as the loudest unidentified noise ever recorded underwater while Julia remained the strangest. 

Mining for explanations, the Bloop’s frequency was equated with that of whale sounds, per Science Alert. But it was again detected by the underwater instruments over a distance of 5,000 kilometers, impossible for a whale to do so. "It was there, on Earth's lonely southernmost land mass, that they finally discovered the source of those thunderous rumbles from the deep in 2005," NOAA’s account on “The Bloop” stated. It was revealed as the sound of an icequake, which is the cracking and breaking away of an iceberg from the Antarctic glacier. The recorded audio was, however, sped up to 16 times its original sound. In 2001, oceanographer Chris Fox from NOAA also told CNN that he believed the eerie sound, dubbed The Bloop, was possibly large chunks of ice calving in Antarctica. 

The scarce information and anonymity of these peculiar sounds triggered a series of conspiracy theories, ranging from a rumored shadow lingering in the water in a photo taken by a NASA spacecraft, as pointed out by The Crypto Crew report. To filter out the conspiracy theories and misinformation circling on the internet, NOAA installed additional hydrophones and has since captured multiple sounds resembling The Bloop, seismologist Robert Dziak told WIRED in 2012. With accelerating climate change, researchers may witness similar or stronger sound signals detected by the hydrophones as mountains of ice break away from the Antarctic glaciers.