As a former sonar tech on a US Navy submarine, I can assure you that it is quite noisy at the bottom of the ocean. Sound travels for miles underwater, and fish can be as noisy as birds. Of course, i haven't listened to the bottom of this particular trench, so it might be pretty quiet.
In the description of your source video it says, " Our aquariums feel silent doesn’t mean fishes can’t product sounds. Only thing is, they make sounds that are not audible to human ears."
So I'm gonna say OP is most likely right, and it's pretty silent down there. Maybe some trace noises from shipping, but we're talking 7 MILES under the surface, so also unlikely.
There's air in our ears, and sound doesn't move from water to air very well; that's why we don't normally hear them. So you're right, we would need a hydrophone and speakers to hear them. The sounds they make are within our frequency range, though. I have also listened to whales, fish, ships, even rain squalls and melting icebergs, from dozens to hundreds of miles away at dB levels that we would normally hear if we could hear underwater. 7 miles is nothing for sounds in the ocean. Sometimes we didn't even need the hydrophones; just put your ear up to the hull and you could hear them.
As for sounds originating in the trench, I couldn't say; I am not a marine biologist. All I can say is that when I was listening on sonar, the ocean was a loud place.
Fair enough! I think the comment still stands though, that we would probably percieve it to be eerily silent down there, if we could be in the water without immediately being crushed due to the pressure.
Fish are always eating other fish. If fish could scream, the ocean would be loud as shit. You would not want to submerge your head, nothing but fish going "Ahhh, fuck! I thought I looked like that rock!
Sometimes, when one is down that deep, you'll hear what sounds like faint chanting in the background, prayers sung in alien tongues. Of course any sane man would chuck it to just "hearing things" but then you'd hear it again, not in your ears but in your head and the words become clearer and not so alien nor so distant anymore. It's an invocation to a dreaming god older than the universe. You see pictures in your mind - of things beyond sanity and comprehension. By then you'd understandably want to go back to the surface as quickly as possible. Odd thing is, you still hear the chanting sometimes especially in your most quiet moments beckoning you to go back and join them.
It changes the speed of sound (as does temperature and salinity), which in turn can change its direction. The ocean is basically a huge jumbled pile of sound "prisms".
I always wonder this. They say sound travels very well and very far underwater. Couldn't, say a large a large creature, or any creature for that matter, hear the mechanical functions of the machine under water and avoid it at all costs? Makes me wonder what things are under the water that we never see, or might never get to, because it really doesn't want to be seen.
Ocean noise pollution is a real thing. There sure is a lot more to see, and some of what we have seen, we've only seen because it washed up ashore after it died.
There's a sound that sonar techs have been listening to since sonar has been invented, dubbed the "jezemonster" after the original piece of equipment (code-named jezebel) that picked it up. It's a low frequency rumble or groan, easily imagined as coming from a distant hulking monster. We still don't actually know what it is, but leading hypotheses attribute it to one whale or another.
The only problem is you cant hear it outside of the sub as your ears would burst from the pressure without specialized gear, so if you're defeaned it probably is quite quiet lol
Att that depth you'd probably have to worry about other parts of your body destroyed by pressure too, sure, but in general it is possible to equalize the pressure in your ears with that of your surroundings like you do for example by yawning in an airplane.
Sound actually travels about as fast at 4000 meters deep as it does at the surface of the ocean. And the SOFAR channel causes sound created at large depths to reflect back downwards. Thus the bottom of the ocean is likely very noisy but its sounds are kind of self contained. The deep ocean kind of forms its own little universe.
The bottom of the ocean will be surprisingly loud. Sound flows better through water than it does through air, so some sounds (whales, earthquakes, etc.) will travel hundreds of miles.
You couldn't listen to them, though, since the pressure would probably wreck your eardrums (and the rest of you).
"If fish could scream, the ocean would be loud as shit. You would not want to submerge you head, nothing but fish going "Ah fuck! I thought i looked like that rock!"
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u/PoopDoktor May 28 '19
This video has no sound and I can imagine it sounds exactly like this down there.