https://www.wired.com/story/cyberpunk-albatrosses-secret-explosions/
"Sometimes, the most important sounds are those that cannot be heard.
Take infrasound—acoustic waves below the range of human hearing. Although
nuclear weapons blasts, midair meteor explosions, volcanic paroxysms, and angry
thunderstorms make plenty of noise people can hear up close, the infrasound
these phenomena emanate can also circumnavigate the globe. Even if a scientist
is half the world away, their infrasound detector may be able to pick it up.
Despite its promise as a remote sensing technique, you can’t register these
sources of infrasound everywhere. The world’s oceans are not only cacophonous,
but the absence of land—particularly within the Southern Hemisphere—has made
placing detectors a seemingly insurmountable challenge. But for Olivier den
Ouden, an acoustics researcher at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological
Institute, the solution to this conundrum was obvious: put infrasound sensors
into tiny backpacks and get albatrosses to wear them.
Turning the Southern Ocean’s largest seabirds into cyberpunk spies “was a shot
in the dark,” says den Ouden. But as his team reported this August in the
journal Geophysical Research Letters, it actually worked. As those feathered
friends flitted above the frigid waters midway between southern Africa and
Antarctica, the instruments in their backpacks recorded various sources of
infrasound, suggesting that it is possible to listen for all sorts of distant
booms without requiring any land to site detectors.
When Daniel Bowman, a geophysicist at Sandia National Laboratories in
Albuquerque, New Mexico, first read the paper, he recalls saying, “You’ve got
to be kidding me.” But by the time he had completed his peer review, he was
convinced of the team’s claims. “I couldn’t believe it,” he says."
Via Christoph S.
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*** Xanni ***
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mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
