Mysterious booms and trembles plague Midwest Town

[Pasta Little Brioni]

SCARY!!!

http://gma.yahoo.com/blogs/abc-blogs...-abc-news.html

.........Mysterious Booms and Trembles Plague Wisconsin Town, Baffle Scientists
..By Kevin Dolak
.Posts .By Kevin Dolak | ABC News Blogs – 14 minutes ago
....
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Police, residents and experts are baffled by the source of mysterious booms and shaking that have been plaguing the town of Clintonville, Wis., for the past three days, and have caused some residents to flee.
The Clintonville Police Department said they have received over 250 calls about noises from underground shaking homes in the northeast corner of the town near Green Bay, Wis. with approximately 5000 residents.

The mystery is even stumping some of the brightest minds at the University of Wisconsin, who were consulted about whether or not these booms could be related to seismic activity.

"I think we can rule out that standard earthquake activity, [that] some swarm of earthquakes is happening in that region. It also really looks like it's not connected to, say, unusual drilling activity or some other kind of real obvious human induced signal, " Harold Tobin, one of those professors in the Geoscience department at the University of Wisconsin told WKOW.

Tobin headed to Clintonville after he received a call from the Wisconsin Geological Survey office asking for help.

Tobin and a colleague looked at activity on several of the seismometers that sit in the region near Clintonville. He says there is an indication that it is an especially noisy site, but not noisy enough to cause the sounds people there are describing.

Tobin says it does appear the sounds are either coming from the surface of the ground or just underneath the surface. He says that he is just as confused and intrigued as anyone as to what exactly is causing the sounds, and adds that there are other instruments that could be put out in the region where the sounds are to record noise in the air, and also ground vibrations at a higher frequency.

This would help to pinpoint exactly where the sounds and coming from and what their characteristics are.

Residents of the area say that they find the noises and shakes puzzling and troubling.

"They're pretty loud when they vibrate the windows and you can feel the vibration on the floor and on the ground," Verda Schultz told ABC News affiliate WBAY.

The city has so far managed to rule out problems with the water and sewer system, elevated gas levels, area blasting or mining, industrial businesses, and even military operations, WBAY reported.

"I think that right now the greatest possibility is that it is some sort of natural phenomenon. I think that it's a possibility that there is some earth shifting going on underneath the ground that creates those popping sort of exploding popping or vibrating noises that people feel," City Administrator Lisa Kuss said.

The booms and shakes have gotten so bad that they have begun to drive residents from the town.

"Our dog is scared, our neighbors are leaving and stuff, so we decided we are going somewhere else for a while," Dennis Padia said. "It's that loud, and it bothers you. You can't go to sleep."

[Iowanian]

Relax.


It's just Oprah Winfrey falling off of the Rosie bandwagon.

[gblowfish]

BJ Raji had too many cheese curds and Leinie's. He's ballistic.

[loochy]

Originally Posted by Iowanian

Relax.


It's just Oprah Winfrey falling off of Rosie's her own bandwagon.

FYP

[Fish]

[Okie_Apparition]

It's underground mega mushroom spooring season

[bevischief]

There has been a very large increase in reports of people hearing noises / sounds / rumblings which seems to coincide with increased earthquake activity.

[Pasta Little Brioni]

Supposedly this is just related to a small earthquake. Nothing to see move along.

http://news.yahoo.com/usgs-micro-qua...211351762.html


MILWAUKEE (AP) — A minor earthquake occurred this week near the eastern Wisconsin city where researchers have been investigating a series of unexplained booming sounds, federal geologists said Thursday.

The U.S. Geological Survey said the 1.5-magnitude earthquake struck Tuesday just after midnight in Clintonville, a town of about 4,600 people about 40 miles west of Green Bay.

Geophysicist Paul Caruso told The Associated Press that loud booming noises have been known to accompany earthquakes. It's possible the mysterious sounds that town officials have been investigating are linked to the quake, he said.

Earthquakes can generate seismic energy that moves through rock at thousands of miles per hour, producing a sonic boom when the waves come to the surface, Caruso said.

"To be honest, I'm skeptical that there'd be a sound report associated with such a small earthquake, but it's possible," he said.

Those reservations didn't stop Clintonville City Administrator Lisa Kuss from declaring "the mystery is solved" at a news conference Thursday evening.

She said USGS representatives described the event as a swarm of several small earthquakes in a very short time.

"In other places in the United States, a 1.5 earthquake would not be felt," she said. "But the type of rock Wisconsin has transmits seismic energy very well."




The U.S. Geological Survey says earthquakes with magnitude of 2.0 or less aren't commonly felt by people and are generally recorded only on local seismographs. Caruso said the Tuesday earthquake was discovered after people reported feeling something, and geologists pored through their data to determine that an earthquake did indeed strike.

Local residents have reported late-night disturbances since Sunday, including a shaking ground and loud booms that sound like thunder or fireworks.

City officials investigated and ruled out a number of human-related explanations, such as construction, traffic, military exercises and underground work.

Clintonville resident Jordan Pfeiler, 21, said she doubted an earthquake caused the noises. She said the booms she experienced were in a series over the course of several hours and not continuous as she might have expected if they were caused by an earthquake.

Still, she said, "It's a little scary knowing Clintonville could even have earthquakes."

Steve Dutch, a geologist at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, said a 1.5 magnitude earthquake produces the energy equivalent of 100 pounds of explosives and could produce loud sounds.

But he was reluctant to describe Tuesday's event as an earthquake, saying the term is generally used to refer to widespread stress in the earth's crust. What happened in Wisconsin could be near the surface, perhaps caused by groundwater movement or thermal expansion of underground pipes, he said.

Still, Dutch said it was possible that the event could produce a series of sounds over time.

"If you've got something causing a little bit of shifting underground, it may take a while for whatever is causing it to play itself out," he said

Caruso, the U.S. Geological Survey scientist, said Tuesday's event was confirmed as an earthquake because it registered on six different seismometers, including some as far as central Iowa.

Jolene Van Beek, 41, had been jarred awake several times by late-night rumbling this week. When asked by telephone Thursday whether she thought the noises were caused by an earthquake, she joked that she was at a nearby lake "waiting for the tsunami to hit."

"Anything to do with earthquakes is going to freak people out," she said. "You'd never expect it in Wisconsin."

[penguinz]

I am pretty sure it was this.