A body of water that goes boom | Why is this lake belching?

Jim Mead remembers it. Thirty years ago, he was fishing on Seneca Lake in central New York when he believes he witnessed a phenomenon that has intrigued the area for centuries.

Leaning over the side of his boat, he saw something in the water, 5 or 6 meters away. A large bubble, about 1 m in diameter, burst from the depths and exploded on the surface with a loud noise.

“It was a big boom,” said Mr. Mead, 66, captain of a boat that takes cruises to wineries around the lake. “Surprisingly, there was very little splashing, but the noise was enormous! »

New York State has its share of legends. Rip Van Winkle of the Catskill Mountains. The Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow. The Curse of Cohoe Falls on the Mohawk River and the Lake Champlain Monster.

There are also “Seneca cannons” and “Seneca drums,” intermittent, inexplicable roars that residents living near Seneca Lake say they have heard for centuries. These noises are amply documented, their origin remains shrouded in mystery.

The Senecas, an indigenous tribe, attributed these sounds to a deity furious with a warrior who had violated sacred hunting grounds. American folklore has its own legend: these rumbles are said to be the drumbeats of the ghost of a Revolutionary War soldier, wandering in search of his regiment.

James Fenimore Cooper, author of Last of the Mohicansdescribed this phenomenon in his short story entitled The Lake Gunin 1850: “This noise which resembles the firing of a piece of heavy artillery cannot be explained by any of the known laws of nature. »

The mystery solved?

That mystery may finally be solved by researchers who last month probed the depths of Seneca Lake for methane and other geologic gases that would confirm once and for all what has long been suspected: the lake is belching.

“It’s a long-standing mysterious phenomenon,” says Tim Morin, a professor at the College of Environmental and Forest Sciences at the State University of New York, one of three researchers on the expedition. “We think we know the explanation. We still have to prove it. »

The dominant theory explaining these explosions is that put forward in 1934 by Herman Fairchild, co-founder of the Geological Society of America.

In an article published in the journal Science Under the title “Silencing the “Guns” of Seneca Lake,” Herman Fairchild estimated that bubbles of natural gas buried in the ground were escaping into the water through the lake bed.

“The inevitable explosion at the surface, coupled with the reaction of the displaced water, would produce the low, dull sound occasionally heard in the southern part of the Seneca Valley,” he wrote.

However, Fairchild never tested this hypothesis, which he attributed to a geologist and engineer from a local gas company.

Besides, no one tested it, among other things because no one knew where to look due to the random nature of the detonations. They occur unexpectedly, here and there, on the lake which measures 61 km long and 5 km wide at its widest point. Many local residents claim to have only heard them once in their life.

“Their provenance is vague and, like the stem of a rainbow, they are always found ‘elsewhere’ as the observer moves toward their apparent origin,” the newspaper reported The Geneva Daily Times in May 1934.

That changed last year with a sonar survey of Seneca Lake that, much to the surprise of the scientific community, revealed a lake floor resembling the cratered surface of the moon.

That study, conducted by several state agencies seeking to map the lake and obtain high-resolution images of wrecks, showed that the bottom of the southern part of the lake was dotted with 144 craters, some as large as two football fields.

Morin was part of the State University of New York and Cornell University team that in late September took water samples near 15 craters near the bottom. They gave these craters nicknames – “Big Tom”, “Lancelot”, “Peacemaker”, etc. – to clearly distinguish them.

Their work was funded by a $12,700 grant from the state Department of Environmental Conservation and Water Resources Institute. The study’s mandate was to “investigate the holes discovered at the bottom of Seneca Lake and determine whether they are releasing methane and other chemicals that may explain the mysterious thuds heard on the lake for centuries.” Analyzing the water samples and writing the report could take months, scientists have warned.

None of the researchers on the boat heard the roar of the lake. But like almost everyone in the area, they know someone who knows someone who heard it.

“The very first day, someone came to ask us what we were doing. When we explained it to him, he said, ‘Oh yeah, I heard that years ago,'” said Erin Hassett, a doctoral student in environmental sciences.

A fairly widespread phenomenon

Strange noises emanating from bodies of water are not unique to Seneca Lake. Residents of coastal North Carolina have long reported mysterious booms. The Flemish of Belgium call these sounds mistpouffers (“fog burps” in Dutch). The Bay of Bengal has its “Bansal Cannons”. In the Apennines, Italy, the locals call them brontidilike thunder.

Scientists generally attribute these noises to natural phenomena: earthquakes, natural gas, meteorites, or simply thunder. But their true origin remains a mystery.

This article was published in the New York Times.

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