Better watch it next time you go on the annual deep sea fishing trip with the lads from your local, for scientists have detected mysterious noises they believe are being made by real-life sea monsters.
Researchers have dubbed the unidentified sounds, picked up by deep sea microphones, as ‘Bloop’. While it bears the varying frequency hallmark of marine animals it is far more powerful than the calls made by any creature known on Earth.
In 1997, Bloop was detected by sensors up to 3,000 miles apart, New Scientist magazine said. That meant it had to be much louder than any recognised animal noise, including that produced by the largest whales.
One suggestion is that the sound is coming from giant squid, which live at extreme depths of up to two and a half miles. Although dead giant squid have been washed up on beaches, and tell-tale sucker marks have been seen on whales, there has never been a confirmed sighting of one of the elusive cephalopods in the wild. The largest dead squid on record measured about 60ft including the length of its tentacles, but no-one knows how big the creatures might grow.
The system which has detected Bloop was set up by the US Navy in the Cold War. Boffins set up an array of underwater microphones around the globe to track Russian Soviet submarines.
