Scientists have stumbled upon a series of seemingly human-made organised holes on the Atlantic Ocean floor whose origins remain a mystery.
The “perfectly aligned” holes were discovered on 23 July but have been previously reported from the region, researchers studying the ocean floor aboard the NOAA ship Okeanos Explorer said.
Now the NOAA Ocean Exploration agency is inviting members of the public to offer their theories as to how these holes were formed.
“On Saturday’s Okeanos dive, we observed several of these sublinear sets of holes in the sediment. These holes have been previously reported from the region, but their origin remains a mystery,” the agency, which is dedicated to exploring the global ocean, noted in a Facebook post.
“While they look almost human-made, the little piles of sediment around the holes make them seem like they were excavated by… something,” said the federal organisation.
In Saturday’s dive, scientists probed the ocean floor at depths of about 3km while visiting the summit of an underwater volcano north of the Azores – an autonomous region of Portugal in the mid-Atlantic.
They used a remotely operated camera to record the mysterious holes.
The discovery was made during the Okeanos vessel’s Voyage to the Ridge 2022 expedition in which scientists are exploring and mapping the “poorly understood deepwater areas of the Charlie-Gibbs Fracture Zone, Mid-Atlantic Ridge, and Azores Plateau.”
Several people questioned whether a machine had taken sediment samples, or bedrock shifting beneath the bottom of the ocean releasing methane which has bubbled up from inside the Earth.
Some of the answers with less evidence to support them included aliens and “something left over from Atlantis”, while a more rational proposal suggested: “It looks like the sediment falling down through openings, not pressure blowing upward.”
“If there could possibly be something like a submarine buried under there that shifted and sediment fell down through the vents/holes of the outer casing,” they added.
Read more via Sky News/The Independent/Miami Herald
