The Earth generates a small seismic movement every 26 seconds. Is the pulsation caused by ocean waves, volcanoes, or something else entirely? Theories abound but there are no certainties .
The ‘microsism’ doesn’t seem to be hurting anything and it hasn’t been important enough for us to investigate further … but there it is, every 26 seconds.
Constant microsisms
Why does the Earth pulse every 26 seconds, and why can’t scientists explain it after 60 years? This is an enigma wrapped in a periodically predictable mysterious movement.
The pulse, or "microsism" in the jargon of geologists, was first documented in the early 1960s by a researcher named Jack Oliver, then at the Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory , but it did not have the advanced instruments that seismologists now have at their disposal.
Since then, scientists have spent a lot of time listening to the pulse and even figuring out where it came from.
Some researchers think that the pulse has some kind of prosaic cause. Beneath the world’s oceans, the continental shelf acts like a gigantic wave breaking: it is the boundary of the furthest edge of, for example, the North American landmass where the highest part of the plate eventually falls into the deep plain. abyssal. Scientists have theorized that when waves hit this specific spot on the continental shelf in the Gulf of Guinea, this regular pulse occurs .
A team led by Yingjie Xia of the Institute of Geodesy and Geophysics in Wuhan, China, proposed that the most likely source of the 26-second pulse was not waves, but volcanoes.