There is still so much we don’t know about our planet, and the phenomenon known as ‘skyquakes’ continues to confound scientists around the world.
While we understand many of the most fascinating and bizarre natural phenomena on this big blue planet we call home, there is still much we don’t know.
One of these phenomena is sky quakes, and it is easy to see why experts have been wondering what is going on.
Skyquakes can easily be mistaken for a gunshot, or car backfiring, and they’ve been heard around the planet and documented for over 200 years.
While there are many potential theories about what is going on, there isn’t yet a definitive answer.
Scientists have considered that the booms may be meteors exploding in the atmosphere, military testing, or even related to storms or earthquakes.
The first sky quakes were documented in 1811, after people in New Madrid, Missouri, heard strange sounds during a 7.2-magnitude earthquake.
Locals said they heard what sounded like artillery rounds before or during the quake.
Similar noises were then reported during an earthquake in Charleston, South Carolina, in August 1886, which were heard for weeks after the 7.3-magnitude.
The phenomenon has gone by many names, and following an incident in Seneca Lake in central New York state in the 1850s, locals known them as Senaca guns.
James Fenimore Cooper, who lived in Seneca Lakes during one of these skyquakes, described the experience in his short story ‘The Lake Gun.’
Cooper said: “It is a sound resembling the explosion of a heavy piece of artillery that can be accounted for by none of the known laws of nature.
“The report is deep, hollow, distant and imposing. The lake seems to be speaking to the surrounding hills, which send back the echoes of its voice in accurate reply.”
Despite the name, seismologists are unsure whether tectonic activity and these sounds are linked in anyway, however.
In 2020, scientists began using seismic data to try and work out the sound’s origin and to see if they were connected to earthquakes at all.
A team of researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill suggested the sound was to do with the atmosphere, not seismic activity.
