Underwater Microphone Picks up Voices

I couldn’t have known they were voices when my hydrophone first recorded the sound. My best guess was a bowhead whale, although the pitch didn’t fluctuate or go nearly as high as the typical bowhead. This sound was sonorous and powerful, a seemingly sourceless echo reverberating through the ocean depths for at least a dozen miles around my ship.

My name is Alyssa Williams, and I’m a marine biologist studying the effect of global warming on hourglass dolphins and other arctic mammals. Hydrophone recordings are an essential tool in calculating the density and diversity of ocean life, although this is the first time I’ve heard something like this in the past two weeks I’ve been at sea.

We like to think these expeditions give us a pretty good idea of what’s going on down there, but it’s really more like scooping a bucketful of water from the ocean and concluding whales don’t exist because they didn’t fit in the bucket. There are plenty of unexplained phenomenon and outlier data points, and most of the time we have to just ignore them so they don’t contaminate the rest of our data.

It was only chance which kept me from ignoring this sound altogether. My son is an electronic music artist (which I’m pretty sure is the same as a DJ?), and he asked me to send him marine recordings to sample into his music. Every week I pick out a few interesting noises to send him, and lacking anything else to do with this mysterious echo, I included it in the last batch.

A couple days later I get an email back. He’s been playing around with the sound, and after speeding it up he noticed it started to sound like voices. He thought I was playing a prank on him, and I thought he was the one trying to fool me. It wasn’t hard to prove though: as soon as I sped up the tapes I began to hear it too.

It was speaking in Spanish, at least at first. It kept switching every other sentence or so, mostly to things that sounded like language, but not one I recognized. I kept pausing the tapes until I was fairly confident I had a few words right. Afrikaans and Ndebele were beginning to pop up regularly. Then about ten minutes into the tape came this in English:

I know you’re listening. I’m listening to you too.

The languages and dialects were consistent with Chile and South Africa, two of the closest countries to the north shore of Antarctica where my vessel was located. I sat on my bunk, playing the tapes over and over, editing and re-editing to make sure I had the original tracks. I kept telling myself it was a practical joke of some kind, but I couldn’t figure out how the prankster could have known I was going to speed up the tapes. I should have told the rest of my crew about it, but I was terrified about looking like an idiot for having missed some obvious explanation. I decided to wait until I’d collected a bit more proof instead.

I barely slept that night, mind spinning with the possibilities. Maybe it was my mind playing tricks on me, but around 2 AM the gentle lull of the boat seemed to change. I didn’t exactly hear the sound, but I could feel it. The reverberations in the ship sinking into my bones, teasing me, beckoning me. I was getting pretty tired and angry at this point, and I wasn’t the only one.

“Turn the damn engine off!” someone yelled. “What the hell, man? It’s going to ruin the recordings and chase everything away.”

So that’s what I’d felt. I forced myself to take a deep breath and close my eyes again.

“It was never on. Go back to sleep, blockhead,” our captain replied.

The vibrations were only getting stronger. I sat up and stared out the porthole at the vastness of the black ocean. My mind was a carefully regulated numbness, afraid to let any thought in for fear of where they would race from there. Then the shouting began, and it was replaced with a different kind of numb. Blind panic.

“How’d we get off course? Where the hell are we?”

“We haven’t moved. Check the GPS.”

“But that wasn’t there last night. What is it?”

I flew out of bed, already fully clothed because of the freezing temperatures. A dark rolling wave passed by the porthole — completely out of sync with the rest of them. Everyone was waking up now, all clambering to get on deck to see what was going on. I went for my laptop instead, going straight to the folder with the new recordings.

The deep moaning call was deafening, maxing out my speakers. It was much, much closer now. My fingers were shaking as I imported the audio into an editor, then sped up the track. My foot was tapping a river dance all by itself — I needed to see what everyone else was seeing, but I was the only one who knew to listen. More shouts meanwhile:

“Iceberg, 11 o’clock. That’s the one you were walking on yesterday, right?”

“Yeah me and David.”

“You labeled it as a dry-dock type, right? It was a dry-dock yesterday.”

“Absolutely. David went all the way down the channel.”

“So why’s it look like a pinnacle now? Shit, look at the waterline. The whole fucking thing is rising.”

Spanish from the recording. I kept scrubbing through, picking up a few isolated English words as I went:

Frozen. Thawed. Hungry — those stood out from the random scattered words.

“Turn the engine on now!” I screamed. There was a lot of shouting above deck — I couldn’t make sense of it. I bolted up the stairs, just in time to see —

“That’s not an ice pinnacle. It’s a fucking fin.”

At least least twenty feet high, sinuous webbing connecting the long bony spurs which continued to rise out of the water. The captain was finally back behind the wheel, and the engine roared to life. A swelling wave lifted the whole ship at least a dozen feet in the air, hurling us back down at a nearly 45 degree angle. The impetus combined with our acceleration to launch us away at a reckless pace, hurling everyone and everything that wasn’t tied down.

The whole iceberg we’d been stationed next to had vanished behind us. That was four hours ago, and we haven’t slowed down yet. No-one has spotted the fin again, but it must still be below us because the hydrophone is blasting that sonorous echo. We won’t make any official announcement to the scientific community until we’ve had a chance to analyze the rest of the tapes, but I need someone out there to know what happened.

Just in case we don’t make it back.