There is a detectable rumbling, and instruments built specifically to measure it can record it. But since everyday tectonic movement doesn’t really make a difference to how we live, there’s no reason for our bodies to have adapted to sense that part of our environment. And when seismic events do affect our lives, it’s often at frequencies that we don’t really consider to be sound. The seismic waves in earthquake events are primarily between 10 hertz and 1/100th of a hertz, which are significantly lower than the lowest frequencies we perceive as sound. Below about 20 hertz we stop ‘hearing’ pressure waves and experience them more as bodily thuds.
Media representations of the earth’s interior are horribly misleading.
The earth’s inner core is solid, the outer core is liquid, the mantle – making up most of the rest of the planet is also solid, but flows on geological timescales (think about a finger width per year)
The crust is largely rigid and sits on top. Nothing there would be described well as “roiling”.
Magma is a separate thing, and represents liquid generated by the partial melting of the mantle. It rises up to feed volcanoes. It’s a tiny miniscule proportion of the Earth, and often in very small pockets. That’s not to say we don’t feel it – volcanic earthquakes and deformation on the scale of mm to cm occurs when magma is intruded near the surface.
The mantle is not magma, and does not behave like magma.
There is a detectable rumbling, and instruments built specifically to measure it can record it. But since everyday tectonic movement doesn’t really make a difference to how we live, there’s no reason for our bodies to have adapted to sense that part of our environment. And when seismic events do affect our lives, it’s often at frequencies that we don’t really consider to be sound. The seismic waves in earthquake events are primarily between 10 hertz and 1/100th of a hertz, which are significantly lower than the lowest frequencies we perceive as sound. Below about 20 hertz we stop ‘hearing’ pressure waves and experience them more as bodily thuds.
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