Most of that sound is caused by artifacts of slowing the bloop down but keeping it in audible frequencies.
Here's a more realistic version of the sound and a rationale of how it was made (needs a sub-woofer or some decent headphones to actually hear it):
http://porkrind.org/missives/the-bloop/
I confess to be slightly disappointed at this. Although there was speculation that this was indeed iceberg related, there was also speculation that possibly a living creature could be the source of this. Sad to say this but it appears that the age of discovering large animals is long past us.
Very true. Apparently we've only explored 5%, leaving 95% for a giant something to be living. It would be a sad day to realize there is nothing left to be discovered. Even at an older age I still find it fascinating and exciting to think there is something unknown, mystical and possibly magical in this world.
I was talking to a friend recently about how little of the sea we had explored, and he wondered out loud why it seems like people tend to take a bigger interest in space than deep sea exploration.
I joked that it's because the sea is goddam scary and we're less likely to find things with tentacles in space.
But it's still a good question. Space exploration gets a lot more love from entertainment, pop culture, and news outlets.
The start may be expensive, but currently Pioneer 10 moves at over 10 km/s on about 100W of power. That is over 360,000 km on a kWh, and that mostly (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_anomaly) is not spent for propulsion.
I work in the subsea industry and when our ship has planned downtime we're allowed to go do marine research, basically just looking at the marine life that grows on and around structures at >1000m. So it does happen. Just on a very small scale!
I'm amazed that someone with FU Money hasn't funded some kind of underwater equipment to be bolted onto ships like yours, and a website to collate that data and any other data that people want to contribute.
A bunch of data isn't science, but it's a start.
I guess it's a problem that most submarines are military vessels - they could collect lots of data but releasing that data is tricky.
I tend to work in Oil and Gas, on the subsea installation side of things, the Oil Company doesn't like to advertise the position of subsea assets so I guess making data on them freely available is out of the question. I think the research project we worked on was call Serpent, it might be worth a google..
Also to record subsea date you dont need a manned submarine, ROVs are used day in day out and now AUVs are used more often.
It's also rather starved of energy sources - not the ideal environment for large organisms.
I'm sure there are hundreds or even thousands of bizarre and interesting species to be discovered, but the likelihood that any of them will be impressively large is very slim.
Huh? Actually it's actually the reverse - deep sea creatures that we have discovered so far have a tendancy to be larger than their shallow-sea counterparts.
Very interesting - so having a large body may actually save energy via the increasing mass-to-surface ratio, and of course it's much easier to keep a large body mobile underwater thean on land.
So there is hope for finding some Great Old Ones after all!
I don't believe it was anything crazy and that I believe that there is probably a common answer for what this was, but I am amazed at the HN comments so far that take this post for certification of an idea.
For some reason that reminded me of the climatic (pun?) scene where the bad guys' undersea under ice lair blows up and the ice falls down to the ocean floor facepalm
