Invisible Waves Shake the Earth

Big seismic waves made an appearance on different locations around the world on the morning of November 11. These waves occurred roughly fifteen miles off the shores of Mayotte, an island between Africa and the northern tip of Madagascar. It struck across Africa, and ringed sensors in Zambia, Kenya, and Ethiopia. These waves also traveled all the way to Chile, New Zealand, Canada, and even Hawaii approximately 11,000 miles away. Not only did the waves zip up but they ranged longer than twenty minutes, but still not one person felt the strong waves.

It was noticed by the odd signal on the U.S. Geological Survey’s real-time seismograph presented. Researchers posted the strange zigzags and images on social media which made researchers around the world hypothesize what could’ve possibly caused these strange waves. Stephen Hicks, a seismologist at the University of Southampton, compared the waves to geological types of waves. He did this to find the potential cause or source.

The Science and Speculation

The fastest traveling signals called Primary waves, or P-waves are just compression waves that move in bunches. The secondary type of waves or S-waves has a side to side type of motion. These types of waves have relatively high frequencies which compare to a sort of ping rather than a rumbling. Yet, the most similar waves to the strange waves that rippled around the world are the long-period surface waves. On intense earthquakes, these types of waves can go around several parts of the world multiple times and make Earth ring like a bell.

There’s no logical explanation as to why these strange waves took place, and there was no huge earthquake that had recently kicked off these unusual which made this event mysterious. Since most earthquakes send out waves with a variety of different frequencies, it was puzzling that Mayottes’ signal was a clean zigzag controlled by just one type of wave that was steady for just seventeen seconds.

Many believe these waves occurred due to the tremors that struck Mayotte since last May. Hundreds of earthquakes have hit this small place and within this time most of them radiate from around thirty-one miles offshore. However, tremors were minor but the largest magnitude was 5.8 on May 15 and perhaps it’s what led to cause the unusual waves that appeared around the world.