Thursday, November 24, 2005

A singing ICEBERG??!!!




This is not the actual iceberg under discussion, but the photo accompanied the original article on Yahoo. This iceberg is only 700m long and off the coast of Argentina.


Yes, folks. Believe it or not, scientists in the Antarctic have found a 50 kilometer long iceberg that seems to "sing". Actually, it's having a "love duet" with an underwater peninsula - created by its scraping around that land mass they collided. Apparently when the iceberg "got stuck", the water rushing through the crevasses at high pressure created acoustic signals that were picked up by a German research studying earthquakes and tectonic movements on the Ekstroem ice shelf on Antarctica's South Atlantic coast back in 2002 - the study was just published in Science last Friday. While these signals are too low for the human ear to hear normally (ah, this iceberg is a basso!), when played back at higher speed, they sounded like a swarm of bees or like an orchestra warming up, and it goes up and down like a real piece of music.

Here is the link to the original story on Yahoo. Unfortunately, no sound files were provided. Even more tragic, logistics will prevent this talented geological phenomenon from making a Met debut. No doubt, however, considering the slow pace of tectonic change, this iceberg will undoubtedly have a long and marvelous career - assuming global warming doesn't get it first!

Incidentally, in light of my fascination with astronomy, the universe itself "sings". Apparently astrophysicists now believe that the universe "vibrates" on a note about 64 octaves below middle C.

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