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Earth’s Heartbeat – Mysterious Sound is Generated every 26 Seconds

Earth’s heartbeat is the name of a sound that appears every 26 seconds, but so far there has been no exact explanation for that sound.

Dyedo Tikio
4 min readDec 3, 2020

Since the 1960s, seismologists on many continents have discovered that a mysterious pulse that appears to be timed every 26 seconds appears once. But for the past 60 years, no one has been able to figure out what this sound really is.

The “Earth’s Heartbeat” was first recorded in 1962, by John Oliver, a researcher at the Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory, Columbia University. He discovered that it came from somewhere in the southern or equatorial Atlantic, and that the sound was more intense during the Northern Hemisphere summer months.

Then, in 1980, Gary Holcomb, a geologist with the US Geological Survey, also discovered this mysterious pulse and noted that it is stronger during a storm. But for some reason, the two researchers’ findings remained largely unknown for more than two decades, until a graduate student at the University of Colorado, Boulder, once again discovered “heartbeat “and decided to study about it.

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