The Bloop

The Bloop is the phenomenon without which this site might not exist. As related on the History page, learning about the Bloop and then relating that news to Lovecraft's stories made me feel awfully close to the protagonist of "The Call of Cthulhu".

Since this curious little sound has been so important in our development, it seems only fair to devote a section of the site specifically to it.

Here are the News articles I've collected on it:

• The article from CNN.com
  • This was really the article that started it all for me.
• The article from theage.com.aus
  • Pretty much the same info, but told in a different way.

You should also check out The NOAA Vents Program page about the Bloop. This site yielded not only a .wav file of the noise itself, but the fact that the sound is believed to be coming roughly from 50oS; 100oW. After reading that, I wondered how close that was to the coordinates given in "The Call of Cthulhu". Allow me to quote: "Then, driven ahead by curiosity in their captured yacht under Johansen's command, the men sight a great stone pillar sticking out of the sea, and in S. Latitude 47°9', W. Longitude l23°43', come upon a coastline of mingled mud, ooze, and weedy Cyclopean masonry which can be nothing less than the tangible substance of earth's supreme terror - the nightmare corpse-city of R'lyeh, that was built in measureless aeons behind history by the vast, loathsome shapes that seeped down from the dark stars." Gotta love it!

And now, you can head Bloop noises right here!

• Bloop.wav: This is the sound as it appears on the NOAA's page. According to them, it was sped up 16 times to produce this file.
• Bloop_nr.wav: This is the same file, but with Noise Reduction applied.
• Bloop_realtime.wav: Now, the original file is slowed down 16 times to attempt to give as accurate a reproduction as possible. WARNING: This file is rather large - 2.5 meg
• Bloop_realtime_nr.wav: Finally, we have the realtime file with noise reduction applied. WARNING: This file is rather large - 2.5 meg

BloopWatch would like to fervently thank BloopWatch Correspondent Colby "Qeveren" Hayward for his help in making these altered files availble to the public.

And just because it's cool, here's the spectrogram of the sound.

We would also like to commend the NOAA for making all of this information available on their website. Without them, this delicious mystery wouldn't be here for us to ponder. I salute them!

You can find the Wikipedia article for the Bloop at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloop.

**UPDATE**: October 31, 2006: Someone's taken our sound file of the slowed down Bloop and made a reaaaally creepy short film comparing the Bloop and Cthulhu! Woo! Happiness! Go check it out. Thanks very much to Dagon's Daughter for pointing this out to me. :)

**UPDATE**: March 16, 2009: The NOAA put out spectrographs of a number of known and unknown underwater sounds, including the Bloop. Our Bloop doesn't seem to match anything we know of already, truly. Thanks to BloopWatch Correspondent James Wallis for sending the link.

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