Deep sea mystery

Let's end the year on a mysterious note: Ping. That’s the noise coming from the seafloor in the far-north Nunavut region of Canada … and no one knows why. In November, Canadian officials admitted that they had no idea what was causing the ping, which had been heard in the Fury and Hecla strait. Military patrols sent to the area found no anomalies, but hunters say that the noise is driving wildlife away. Some people blame the pinging on the mining activities of local companies or Greenpeace, but those companies as well as the activist group said that they weren't operating in the region. The government said it had no plans for further investigations. Thousands of miles away, though, a second sea-sound mystery may have been solved. Researchers who were taking recordings in the Mariana Trench near Guam detected an otherworldly noise — a cross between moaning and twanging — during robotic vehicle dives in 2014 and 2015. This December, they reported that the bizarre noises may be the cries of a minke whale, an elusive type of baleen whale that's rarely seen at the surface. Researchers said in a statement that they don't know much about minke whale activity around the Mariana, or what the call might mean. [Listen to the New Whale Call from the Mariana Trench] "If it's a mating call, why are we getting it year-round? That's a mystery," Sharon Nieukirk, senior faculty research assistant in marine bioacoustics at Oregon State University, said in a statement. "We need to determine how often the call occurs in summer versus winter, and how widely this call is really distributed." Sounds like a job for 2017.

http://www.livescience.com/57310-strangest-science-discoveries.html