Signals from the ice

I was maybe sixteen years old when I first read H. P. Lovecraft's atmospheric and terrifying short story "At the Mountains of Madness."  Unique amongst his fiction, it's set in Antarctica, which I thought was an odd choice; just about everything else I'd read by him was set somewhere in his home territory of New England.  But as I read, I realized what a good decision that was.  There's something inherently alien about the southernmost continent that makes it the perfect place for a spooky story.  Lovecraft writes:

The last lap of the voyage was vivid and fancy-stirring, great barren peaks of mystery looming up constantly against the west as the low northern sun of noon or the still lower horizon-grazing southern sun of midnight poured its hazy reddish rays over the white snow, bluish ice and water lanes, and black bits of exposed granite slope.  Through the desolate summits swept raging intermittent gusts of the terrible antarctic wind, whose cadences sometimes held vague suggestions of a wild and half-sentient musical piping, with notes extending over a wide range, and which for some subconscious mnemonic reason seemed to me disquieting and even dimly terrible.

Of course, being a Lovecraft story, the intrepid band of geologists and paleontologists who are the main characters make discoveries in Antarctica that very quickly lead them to regret ever going there.  Of the two who survive to the very end, one is clearly headed for a padded cell and a jacket with extra-long sleeves, and the other only marginally better-off.

Happy endings were never Lovecraft's forte.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Jerzy Strzelecki, Antarctica(js) 32, CC BY-SA 3.0]

The topic comes up because of a link sent to me by a dear friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia about a peculiar discovery by some scientists working on a different kind of antarctic research -- astrophysics.  The project is called ANITA -- the Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna -- and is designed to detect neutrinos, those ghostly, fast-moving particles that were predicted by Wolfgang Pauli in 1930 based on the fact that momentum and spin seemed not to be conserved in beta decay, so there must be an additional undetected particle to (so to speak) make the equation balance.  Even knowing that it must be there, it still took twelve more years to detect it directly, because it almost never interacts with matter; neutrinos can (and do) pass all the way through the Earth unimpeded.

This is why the experiment is sited in such a remote place.  Signals from actual neutrino capture are so rare that if you put your detection apparatus in an area with lots of human-created electromagnetic noise, you'd never see them.

"You have a billion neutrinos passing through your thumbnail at any moment, but neutrinos don’t really interact," said Stephanie Wissel, of Pennsylvania State University, who leads the ANITA project.  "So, this is the double-edged sword problem.  If we detect them, it means they have traveled all this way without interacting with anything else."

Like Lovecraft's researchers, though, the ANITA team found something they weren't looking for -- and something they have yet to explain.

Fortunately for Wissel and her colleagues, it wasn't a bunch of Shoggoths waiting to tear them limb from limb.

It was radio signals that seemed to be coming from beneath the ice sheet.

"We have these radio antennas on a balloon that flies forty kilometers above the ice in Antarctica," Wissel said.  "We point our antennas down at the ice and look for neutrinos that interact in the ice, producing radio emissions that we can then sense on our detectors.  During those sweeps, we recorded a series of radio pulses.  However, unlike the expected detection of neutrino interactions caused by cosmic neutrinos, we saw bizarre radio pulses originating from the other direction...  The radio waves that we detected were at really steep angles, like thirty degrees below the surface of the ice."

What's weird is that although the neutrinos themselves can pass through huge, massive objects without being bothered, radio waves can't.  So whatever is causing the radio waves really does seem to be under the ice sheet -- but not very far under the ice sheet.

At the moment, the researchers have no good explanation for the detection, which they are calling "anomalous."

"My guess is that some interesting radio propagation effect occurs near ice and also near the horizon that I don’t fully understand, but we certainly explored several of those, and we haven’t been able to find any of those yet either," Wissel said.  "So, right now, it’s one of these long-standing mysteries."

Well, "the scientists can't explain it" opens the doors for the wackos to say "... but we can!"  I snooped a little around some of the sketchier subreddits and YouTube channels -- not a task recommended for the faint of heart -- and I'm already seeing the following:

• It's an auto-transmitter left over from an abandoned Nazi base.  Or... maybe... one that isn't abandoned.  *meaningful eyebrow raise*
• It's a relay station operated by the Illuminati.  One person recommended that the ANITA team get the hell out for their safety's sake, because "these people don't like anyone knowing of their existence."
• It's a leaking signal from inside the "hollow Earth."  So there must be an opening into the interior nearby, which the ANITA team should focus on finding.
• Something about the Schumann Resonance that was about ten paragraphs long, and which I tried unsuccessfully to paraphrase.  The best I can come up with is "weird cosmic shit is happening and the Earth is responding."
• Aliens.  (You knew they'd come up.)

Okay, folks, can we just hang on a moment?

"We don't know" means... "we don't know."  As astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson put it, "If it's unidentified, then that's where the conversation should stop.  You don't go on and say 'so it must be' anything."  And call me narrow-minded, but I'm content to wait for the actual scientists to figure out what's going on here rather than listening to a bunch of wackos who are using an anomalous radio signal to support whatever particular brand of lunacy they happen to favor.

And I can guarantee that whatever it turns out to be, it won't be a Nazi Illuminati radio transmitter tuned by aliens to the Schumann Resonance sending signals from inside the hollow Earth.

So what we have here is a curious and unexpected detection of a radio signal that is currently unexplained, but probably will be at some point.  This is one of the exciting things about science, isn't it?  Stumbling upon something you didn't even know was there.  These sorts of discoveries often open up new avenues of research, and sometimes (albeit rarely) can completely turn our models on their heads.

Wissel and her team have some exciting times ahead.

Me, I'd just as soon watch their progress from a distance, however.  I do not like being cold.  I've found Antarctica fascinating for a very long time, but I don't know if I'd ever be brave enough to go there.

And that's not even counting the danger of being mauled by Shoggoths, which I'm sure would ruin your day.

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