I understand that sound waves essentially stretch and disperse very quickly, but technically, aren’t the very tiny sound waves still there, thousands of miles away?

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Could very very sensitive instruments pick up on sounds that happened far away?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

So the answer is “yes”. Enter the [Bloop](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloop). Note here we are talking about ultra low frequency, high amplitude sound that is traveling in the deep ocean.

Similarly, earthquake detection also rely on detecting “sound”. The waves generated by earthquakes are also low frequency and high amplitude. In this case, the sound is traveling through Earth’s mantle, and can be detected by sensors around the world.

But when it comes to the kind of sound that we humans can hear, that travels through the air — the Earth is just too noisy of a place for weak sound signals to be detectable over noise at thousands of miles away.

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