Mysterious holes on the seafloor | Hacker News Reader

Mysterious holes on the seafloor

oceanexplorer.noaa.gov

385 pointssmartmic135 comments

This reminds me of another deep sea mystery trace, Paleodictyon[1]. Once an unconnected set of geometric fossils and modern hole patterns, it's been discovered that this phenomenon has occurred in a consistent form for half a billion years up to the present day.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleodictyon

There's a nice PBS video about them with footage of the holes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pz1fccY3S84

Anybody else repulsed by that pattern? I don’t know why but I am.

Trypophobia. I won't link to Wikipedia, if such a thing bothers you I'm not going to try to trigger it.

There is also a subreddit dedicated to that phobia, I don’t believe I have it but some of the pictures there definitely give me the willies.

Fair warning: The subreddit is focused on _triggering_ the phobia.

It takes a particular type of masochist to have tropophobic tendencies and being subscribed to that subreddit.

No more then when people get kicks from horror movies no?

Exposure therapy?

I didn't have trypophobia but after looking at Google Images I think I do now

I'll be looking at lotus seeds differently now

I'm not sure if I have it, but when I searched for image examples it looked extremely gross to me.

EDIT: I seriously regret searching it now. Please don't while you still can. It is absolutely grotesque.

> Please don’t while you still can.

Counterpoint: you (reader) should give in to that gnawing feeling of curiosity. One little peek never hurt anyone.

(Really, it’s not that bad.)

I searched it, and, for me it was interesting and I became curious. Some pictures were obviously doctored and made to make you feel something, others, were just.. interesting.

Not everyone is triggered by those pictures, to me they don't look gross at all. I can scroll through pics of lotus seed pods all day.

What’s weird is the images in the article freaked me out. The Google search images did nothing for me. Maybe I was just primed / warned ?

It's the hands...it's all you get to see with duckduckgo. The hands are nasty...

I can put myself in the headspace of finding it creepy, but by default it just looks like stuff to me. Regular objects. In the case of honeycomb it can actually look beautiful, though.

I don’t get what the big deal is. Most of it was just some fake images of holes in hands and stuff? And the seed pod is scary for some reason?

Some might take that as an indication that you don't have trypophobia.

Okay, the lotus seed pictures did nothing to me, but Google Images is filled with far more disgusting images.

Stay away!

> Okay, the lotus seed pictures did nothing to me, but Google Images is filled with far more disgusting images.

Same! Why does body mutilation imagery like that rank so high for that search term? Ugh!

Fascinating. I'd never heard of trypophobia before reading this post this morning... right after which I walked into an art exhibit and saw this amazing painting by Alfredo Arreguín...

https://ibb.co/GQrrxNY

"trypophobia" ("fear of holes") is a phenomenon where some people find similar patterns to that disturbing or repellant, might be the same thing. Of course Googling that will give you lots of similar images that you might find similarly repellant.

Others linked it, but I believe trypophobia was an evolutionary advantage genetic instinctive trait that kept early human carriers repulsed and therefore safely avoidant of infestations (contagious disease welts/boils, harmful insect hives, and the like).

i had an old encloypaedia when I was a kid. It had been published in the 1960s. In it under the computer section it had a colour photo of a processor or something and it was this incredibly dense criss-cross pattern of what looked like wiring. I never knew why but that picture used to give me a funny feeling in my brain that I didn't like.

Probably a core memory board?

I don't know, next time i'm in my parent's last house I will see if the book made it there.

Yes and no. I’m repulsed when it’s used as some sort of horror imagery superimposed on someone’s skin. But otherwise it’s a fairly pleasing pattern. Unfortunately it’s hard to understand grotesque imagery.

Yes but more scared than repulsed. It made me feel scared for some reason.

Immediately not clicking.

It's a simple pattern which I'll describe in this paragraph with some padding before and after, so you may give up on reading, even though it is in my opinion among the mildest patterns that would trigger trypophobia. It's a fossil of a hexagonal grid of tubes imprinted on a rock. There are examples of the pattern on a sunny rock, on a sandy rock, an isolated slab of rock with the pattern, and finally what looks like a microscope or underwater picture of similar stringy coral patterns. Now I need some final padding, so someone glancing will not glance at the end of the paragraph and see some of the description. But I'm not sure on what to say here, as there isn't much to it, it's just a fossil. There are no gruesome images.

I was being glib. I find myself occasionally silently belittling trigger warnings in social media and news stories, but the Tiny Holes thing really triggers me. I'm not going to Google the word right now to remember how to spell it correctly.

I don't even recall if it was legit - being early days internet - but I remember (and cannot un-remember) the image of a frog that would give birth to tadpoles, or maybe tiny frogs, out of its back. Horrifying.

That Paleodictyon is clearly a fossilized chickenwire fence. Source: grew up on a chicken farm.

Some theories

- A large starfish rolls along the sea floor, leaving the dashed line

- A crab bouncing on its back, ricocheting with a current

- A fish with an IQ of 300 hoping that alien intelligence from above will locate it, left a mark in the mud, to liberate it

- The world was manufactured in a sowing factory.

- The world sustained an injury and had stiches

It’s hard to tell. It’s a single angle so it’s kind of hard to tell what it could be. If they had multiple angles and some closer ups, we might be able to guess better. As it is it’s hard to tell if it’s something protruding with shadows or or the opposite like slits or holes in the surface.

There's two angles

These are clearly holes left by creatures living deep within the Earth, beginning to investigate their cosmos. They have not yet found the surface, but that day is coming. Oh, yes. Someday they will arise. We should all prepare ourselves.

I like the idea of an animal probing the floor for scent/sound/EM fields for prey, but you'd think we would have a seen a lot more of it if that were the case.

The article didn't mention excavating the holes to see what was underneath... My guess is maybe it's a creature that lays eggs in sand.

At the end of the video, they show a small portion of the holes where they dug a sample, and they said they're testing it with results pending.

The holes look to be in the middle of some kind of track, or drag mark. Which would indicate that they are made from the surface, I guess.

It scares me how much of the oceans we still haven't explored and how much stuff there still is down there. I think more than 80% are unexplored so far..

> A large starfish rolls along the sea floor, leaving the dashed line

Sounds like they found Bikini Bottom.

Maybe a fish or crab hiding its eggs in the mud? At even distances whilst swimming/walking in some direction

(I don't think so :-) just a thought)

It often feels like there aren't many mysteries left in nature, so it's great to see scientists react with childlike excitement about the prospect of something new and unexplained.

Check out meditation. It could be called a study of seeing.

Given one way of seeing, certain models and conclusions can be drawn. But change the seeing and the models cease to hold. And then change it again. And again.

We have a couple of methods for messing with that. A whole seeing-cultivation program.

Lots of good mystery there.

The deep ocean is a great place to look for such mysteries too, we have such a limited view of it, and it's _such_ an alien place in a lot of ways.

Well all the old mysteries aren't really moving forward very much so a new mystery is a lot more exciting. The odds of solving a mystery is most likely inversely proportional to how many people who have attempted to solve it before. There's still a lot we don't know, though.

There are entire fields which are, by their very nature, limited in how much we can learn. Archeology and astronomy are two. Like what's up with the Phaistos Disc?

I never heard of The Phaistos Disc previously. Very clearly it’s another example of someone making a record of the weird lightshows in the sky that ancient peoples witnessed when enough energy was flowing through the local plasma environment to cause it to go from dark mode to glow mode.

Given the irregular distance between holes and the different angles of the holes, I'd guess something organic. There's still a lot we don't know about even well known fish like sharks, what to talk of fish or marine life that we have yet to discover. Seeing the raised ridge along the entire set of holes makes me wonder if they're from some kind of eggs that hatched after being embedded in the seabed.

It's amazing that there are still so many mysteries like this on Earth.

> Given the irregular distance between holes and the different angles of the holes,

They say the exact opposite in the video: "One of the things we're interested in is how almost perfectly aligned these are and the regularity of the spacing of the holes and the size of the holes themselves. And the shape of the holes, the angularity, the rectangularness."

They are pretty regular, but not perfectly so; and in the vid they are sorta straight but do curve a bit. Biological regularity it less rigid than physical regularity.

1:02, they look to be about +/- 40%. 1:22 looks like about +/- 30%. For what an oceanographer usually sees, sure, but I can't imagine it's a wheel.

The American NR-1 submarine had wheels on the bottom. Not the kind that would make this pattern, but I wonder if there are any classified subs with cog wheels for some reason. Seems an unlikely explanation for these holes but got me googling around for weird submarines.

I considered this too and started discounting it when I looked more closely at the paths in the images. The holes aren't perfectly spaced and each hole seems to be at a slightly different angle. But yea, could still be some kind of submarine with an unknown tread or wheel system we've never publicly seen.

The weirdest part is that its in a very straight line. Could only make sense if this was like a single large organism and even still weird.

What do you mean? Colonies of small organisms often form perfectly straight or uniform patterns.

Not always straight.

You’d probably expect them to be much longer if that was the case.

The ocean is vast, the likelihood of stumbling on such traces by chance is ridiculously low.

It would have to be a specialized sub to go to that depth right? I think normal nuke subs don't go anywhere near that deep right?

Looks an awful lot like the patterns left by woodpeckers who probe wood for critters to eat. Perhaps this is an animal that occasionally checks for sound, chemicals or some electrical field that would indicate a burrowed creature nearby to eat.

Previous discussion. Same holes, different article.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32272937

Could they be traces left by equipment performing some sort of surveying procedure for the sake of laying submarine communications cable? I know there's a cable somewhere at about 1.5 kilometers below sea level, but I don't know if there's a maximum feasible depth.

Submarine cables lie on the seafloor, apparently at a maximum depth of 11km. I believe that's just the maximum depth they've been laid at though, not necessarily a theoretical maximum.

The spinal column of a since devoured vertebrate?

Obligatory cthulhu reference

I wonder with moving water, how old can these holes really be?

Is it that still down there?

You have to admit that the linearity, the spacing and the size and shape are strange if considering an organic origin... Fascinating.

Side note, I wish these kind of discoveries could have some kind of hashtag you could subscribe on the web to keep tabs on them.

try google search alerts. "You can get emails when new results for a topic show up in Google Search. For example, you can get info about news, products, or mentions of your name."

Classified adversarial submarine activity directing seawater into volcanic faults in an attempt to have it make contact with magma, increase pressure and cause artificial natural disasters.

Let me add to my previous comment that it would be prudent for governments around the world to look for these patterns at known seafloor heterogenous fault zones in places where major volcanic, earthquake or tsunami events have occurred in recent history, such as Tonga, Japan and Iceland.

I know this sounds almost conspiracy theory-ish: just looking at the picture, my first guess is man-made. But I'm almost always wrong.

It just looks really perfectly spaced and each one is the same, in a very mechanical way. With all the talk of snooping on undersea data cables, undersea drones, and the continuance of submarine warfare, it seems possible that this is some kind of undisclosed military drone on either side looking for cables?

At 2,5 kilometres or 1,6 miles? Only way that is true is if some cage with points sticking out fell from a ship? Or perhaps wood, that has been rotting away since. -Edit: That also doesn't explain the multiple tracks and that they are not really aligned. Only saw the 2 pictures, but in the video you can see a lot of other "tracks".

Given that they said it also appears in the fossil record I think we can rule out human-made.

The first photo made me think that the observed phenomena is simply an undersea cable.

What do they mean by sublinear here?

"Almost in a line."

O(n^k) where 0 < k < 1

Would O(ln n) be "sublinear", though?

Of course. kuprel already said so.

I'm bad at math, but this is because d/dx ln(x) = x^-1, while d/dx x^k = kx^(-1+k), so as long as k > 0 the derivative of the latter is larger, right?

Well sure but you can also just graph them or compare Taylor series (in radius of convergence, appropriate cut, etc)

Well, the question here was just "is ln(x) sublinear or not?". You can answer that question with much less work: the second derivative is always negative, so the function must be sublinear. Any function that grows linearly must have a second derivative of zero.

More like o(n).

> Almost but not quite linear in shape.

Seems like the intended meaning based on context.

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/sublinear

I’m going to sound like a doofus here but… why not just dig them up? It doesn’t sound like they’re particularly rare and digging them up would probably lend a lot of insight as to why they’re made. I guess an argument could be made that it’s not worth harming the organism that made them to figure it out but then why care at all?

OT: If you are ever curious to see what lies beneath surface, there is a YT channel I could not recommend more: https://www.youtube.com/c/NaturalWorldFacts

Everyone knows that’s how starfish get around

Gateways to the trans-abyssal subway system.

I thought I experienced a glitch in the matrix. I had https://www.lofi.cafe/ playing in one tab, muted the tab to play this video and the ambient sound was still there. Turns out the background of the video is almost identical to the one I was listening to on Lofi.cafe...

Teeny-tiny Dune Sandworms, obviously.

That would be Beetlejuice sandworms.

Well, they are still sandtrout, living in the water!

In the (not recommended) post frank herbert dune novels they actually have water variants of sand worms that get evolved and create ultraspice

If we ignore the fossil record: Def something with mining and colonialism, like those strange holes in the desert: https://youtu.be/twAP3buj9Og

My guess, the large spine of some fish embedded in the floor that somehow got displaced.

Could it be a large creature fell to the ocean floor and was digested. At some point its ribcage pierced into the sediment, making the holes, then once that too had been digested only the holes remain?

We would see much more disturbance in the surrounding sediment. A whale fall is quite messy, there's never a stage where a perfectly clean spine is in contact with pristine sediment.

Maybe its those tic-tac aliens hovering over the sea?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpeSpA3e56A

Also interesting that they reference similar evidence in fossils.

How old are these ? I feel like the chain of a ship's anchor could imprint such a pattern, and wither away if the water is acid enough. Near a volcano for example.

They're more than a mile below surface. I know of no vessels with chains nearly that long...

I was thinking of a chain that would have sunk at the bottom.

These holes are from an organism - there are known holes of similar theme that have known inhabitants.

Google claims the longest mooring chain is 17km long.

That makes a 1 mile chain not seem unlikley.

Yikes! Well, thanks for educating me. I knew some large carriers had much shorter chains, so assumed they would have been the longest. Guess not.

Gad to see they have already thought of my first guess. Gases raising from the sea bed. Could be something as boring as that.

Maybe some courtship display? If that's the case we should see them elsewhere too.

I was scared they were talking about methane deposits.

Rapid release of deep seas methane deposits is ELE stuff.

Human in my opinion. Maybe a bottom sampler o some scientific stuff. Maybe fishermen stuff.

I am not saying it's UFOs but many of the UFOs observed by the US Navy/Airforce were spotted on top of oceans and many have been reported to "disappear" into the ocean. The famous Tic-Tac UFO for example notably disappeared "into the ocean".

I thought this too but these holes don't look very engineered. They look random or organic.

That said, this would be an interesting way to create an 'existence proof' of technological capability and presence if there was something about the holes that permitted ruling out animals or other natural phenomena.

The US Navy and Air Force UFOs explained: https://www.youtube.com/c/mickwest

spoiler: It's not aliens.

mick west says it's not aliens

spoiler: mick west will say everything is not aliens

To be fair, Mick West usually finds a very convincing theory that is much more likely than aliens.

He said he'd love to see footage of something that is truly unexplainable. I mean who wouldn't.

> many of the UFOs observed by the US Navy/Airforce were spotted on top of oceans

The ocean also covers 75% of the earth.

So there’s a fairly high chance it’d occur over an ocean.

Flying objects / areal phenomena don’t have to follow random geographic distribution. Many things cannot be found above oceans.

Unless you know more about UFOs than the rest of us, we have no basis to assume that it will appear above everything.

Also it's likely that an organization called "Navy" usually operates on top of oceans.

Unmanned autonomous alien UFOs would be attracted to USN maneuvers cos that's a pretty dense concentration of interesting EM and ECM.

UFO or Secret division of USAF ?

Which is more believable?

It's blatantly obvious that the holes are leading to r'lyeh.

It reminds me of how qanats look like on aerial images.

Good idea for military, to use for propulsion wheels, which will create traces of such holes.

Because they near impossible to detect from big distance, only on very close, and such tech will be extremely silent.

It's so you can more easily tear the ocean floor.

That, or so the printer could more readily grip the crust while Earth was being fabricated. They usually remove those in post-processing but got lazy with these ones.

You're right. You can see that phenomenon every day with low-price manufactured objects. Even toys!

drug smugglers with a submersible that uses some kind of wheeled, sawtooth'd contraption to propel itself. heard it here first, folks!

the tunnel theory seems fairly easy to test.

maybe not from within a submersible thousands of feet down though.

It's Cthulu.

Fleshlights for dolphins maybe? .. sorry for being obscene ...

The Meg.

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