Scientists Detect the Earth's Atmosphere Ringing Like a Bell

Researchers at the University of Hawaiʻi and Kyoto University discovered that Earth's entire atmosphere is "ringing" like a bell, confirming theories from the last two centuries.

A ringing bell vibrates simultaneously at a low-pitched fundamental tone and many higher-pitched overtones, producing a pleasant musical sound. "Music" does not arrive in the atmosphere as a sound we might hear, but in the form of large-scale waves of atmospheric pressure reaching around the globe and circling across the equator, some going east-to-west and others west-to-east. Every wave is a vibration resonant to the global atmosphere.


At the beginning of the 19th century one of the greatest scientists of history, the French physicist, and mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace, started the fundamental understanding of these atmospheric resonances with groundbreaking insights. Physicists' work over the past two centuries has refined the theory and led to detailed predictions of the wave frequencies that should be present in the atmosphere. However, the hypothesis has lagged behind the actual detection of these waves in the real world.

          

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