The ocean’s a noisy place, but under the regular din of marine life and ship traffic, scientists have detected a strange, much louder sound coming from the Caribbean Sea.
It’s too low to be heard by human ears, but the whistle-like noise is so powerful that researchers have been able to pick up its signature from space – and it’s like nothing they’ve ever heard before.

 
The sound was detected while researchers were analyzing the sea level and pressure in the region over the past 60 years, in an attempt to predict what could happen in the future. Their interest comes from the fact that the Caribbean Sea is an incredibly important part of the global circulation belt, responsible for forming currents that feed into the Gulf Stream. And if we want to understand how our climate’s going to change in the future, we need to better understand how hot and cold water moves around the planet. So scientists from the University of Liverpool in the UK were looking at four different models of ocean activity to try and figure out some of the ocean dynamics in the region. But pretty quickly, they realized something strange was going on – their models kept showing pressure oscillations across the Caribbean basin that just didn’t seem to add up.

 
“We were looking at ocean pressure through models for quite different reasons, and this region just didn’t work,” one of the researchers, Chris Hughes, told Gizmodo. “It felt like a sore thumb.” To see if the strange phenomenon was actually real, they checked water levels and pressure readings taken from the bottom of the Caribbean Sea between 1958 and 2013, and also looked at readings from tide gauges and satellite measurements of gravity in the area. It turns out the strange pressure oscillations were happening in real life, as well as in the models, producing a low noise that can best be described as a ‘whistle’.

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