Publication Date:
2011-09-01
Description:
The residents of coastal North Carolina are occasionally treated to sequences of booming sounds of unknown origin. The sounds are often energetic enough to rattle windows and doors. A recent sequence occurred in early January 2011 during clear weather with no evidence of local thunder storms. Queries by a local reporter (Colin Hackman of the NBC affiliate WETC in Wilmington, North Carolina, personal communication 2011) seemed to eliminate common anthropogenic sources such as sonic booms or quarry blasts. So the commonly asked question, "What's making these booming sounds?" remained (and remains) unanswered. This phenomenon is hardly unique to North Carolina or to the modern Industrial Age. Residents in the vicinity of Lake Seneca in the Catskill Mountains of New York have long known similar booming sounds as "Seneca guns" (a term also common throughout the coastal region of the Carolinas). This name has been variously attributed to the section in Washington Irving's short story "Rip Van Winkle" (1819) that describes the ghosts of Henry Hudson's crew playing nine pins in the Catskill Mountains, or to the short story "The Lake Gun" by James Fenimore Cooper (1851). Elsewhere, such sounds are known by a variety of names including "mistpouffers" (fog belches) in coastal Belgium, "Bansal guns" in the Ganges delta and the Bay of Bengal, "brontidi" (thunder-like) in the Italian Apennines (Gold and Sorter 1979), and "yan" by the people of Harami in Shikoku, Japan. Elsewhere, such sounds are known by a variety of names including "mistpouffers" (fog belches) in coastal Belgium, "Bansal guns" in the Ganges delta and the Bay of Bengal, "brontidi" (thunder-like) in the Italian Apennines (Gold and Sorter 1979), and "yan" by the people of Harami in Shikoku, Japan. Proposed explanations for natural booming sounds lacking an obvious proximal source are varied and...
Print ISSN:
0895-0695
Electronic ISSN:
1938-2057
Topics:
Geosciences
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