This reminds me of another deep sea mystery trace, Paleodictyon[1]. Once an unconnected set of geometric fossils and modern hole patterns, it's been discovered that this phenomenon has occurred in a consistent form for half a billion years up to the present day.
Others linked it, but I believe trypophobia was an evolutionary advantage genetic instinctive trait that kept early human carriers repulsed and therefore safely avoidant of infestations (contagious disease welts/boils, harmful insect hives, and the like).
"trypophobia" ("fear of holes") is a phenomenon where some people find similar patterns to that disturbing or repellant, might be the same thing. Of course Googling that will give you lots of similar images that you might find similarly repellant.
I can put myself in the headspace of finding it creepy, but by default it just looks like stuff to me. Regular objects. In the case of honeycomb it can actually look beautiful, though.
I searched it, and, for me it was interesting and I became curious. Some pictures were obviously doctored and made to make you feel something, others, were just.. interesting.
Fascinating. I'd never heard of trypophobia before reading this post this morning... right after which I walked into an art exhibit and saw this amazing painting by Alfredo Arreguín...
Yes and no. I’m repulsed when it’s used as some sort of horror imagery superimposed on someone’s skin. But otherwise it’s a fairly pleasing pattern. Unfortunately it’s hard to understand grotesque imagery.
i had an old encloypaedia when I was a kid. It had been published in the 1960s.
In it under the computer section it had a colour photo of a processor or something and it was this incredibly dense criss-cross pattern of what looked like wiring. I never knew why but that picture used to give me a funny feeling in my brain that I didn't like.
I don't even recall if it was legit - being early days internet - but I remember (and cannot un-remember) the image of a frog that would give birth to tadpoles, or maybe tiny frogs, out of its back. Horrifying.
It's a simple pattern which I'll describe in this paragraph with some padding before and after, so you may give up on reading, even though it is in my opinion among the mildest patterns that would trigger trypophobia. It's a fossil of a hexagonal grid of tubes imprinted on a rock. There are examples of the pattern on a sunny rock, on a sandy rock, an isolated slab of rock with the pattern, and finally what looks like a microscope or underwater picture of similar stringy coral patterns. Now I need some final padding, so someone glancing will not glance at the end of the paragraph and see some of the description. But I'm not sure on what to say here, as there isn't much to it, it's just a fossil. There are no gruesome images.
I was being glib.
I find myself occasionally silently belittling trigger warnings in social media and news stories, but the Tiny Holes thing really triggers me. I'm not going to Google the word right now to remember how to spell it correctly.
These are clearly holes left by creatures living deep within the Earth, beginning to investigate their cosmos. They have not yet found the surface, but that day is coming. Oh, yes. Someday they will arise. We should all prepare ourselves.
I like the idea of an animal probing the floor for scent/sound/EM fields for prey, but you'd think we would have a seen a lot more of it if that were the case.
The article didn't mention excavating the holes to see what was underneath... My guess is maybe it's a creature that lays eggs in sand.
It’s hard to tell. It’s a single angle so it’s kind of hard to tell what it could be. If they had multiple angles and some closer ups, we might be able to guess better. As it is it’s hard to tell if it’s something protruding with shadows or or the opposite like slits or holes in the surface.
It scares me how much of the oceans we still haven't explored and how much stuff there still is down there. I think more than 80% are unexplored so far..
It often feels like there aren't many mysteries left in nature, so it's great to see scientists react with childlike excitement about the prospect of something new and unexplained.
Well all the old mysteries aren't really moving forward very much so a new mystery is a lot more exciting. The odds of solving a mystery is most likely inversely proportional to how many people who have attempted to solve it before. There's still a lot we don't know, though.
There are entire fields which are, by their very nature, limited in how much we can learn. Archeology and astronomy are two. Like what's up with the Phaistos Disc?
I never heard of The Phaistos Disc previously. Very clearly it’s another example of someone making a record of the weird lightshows in the sky that ancient peoples witnessed when enough energy was flowing through the local plasma environment to cause it to go from dark mode to glow mode.
Check out meditation. It could be called a study of seeing.
Given one way of seeing, certain models and conclusions can be drawn. But change the seeing and the models cease to hold. And then change it again. And again.
We have a couple of methods for messing with that. A whole seeing-cultivation program.
Given the irregular distance between holes and the different angles of the holes, I'd guess something organic. There's still a lot we don't know about even well known fish like sharks, what to talk of fish or marine life that we have yet to discover. Seeing the raised ridge along the entire set of holes makes me wonder if they're from some kind of eggs that hatched after being embedded in the seabed.
It's amazing that there are still so many mysteries like this on Earth.
> Given the irregular distance between holes and the different angles of the holes,
They say the exact opposite in the video: "One of the things we're interested in is how almost perfectly aligned these are and the regularity of the spacing of the holes and the size of the holes themselves. And the shape of the holes, the angularity, the rectangularness."
They are pretty regular, but not perfectly so; and in the vid they are sorta straight but do curve a bit. Biological regularity it less rigid than physical regularity.
The American NR-1 submarine had wheels on the bottom. Not the kind that would make this pattern, but I wonder if there are any classified subs with cog wheels for some reason. Seems an unlikely explanation for these holes but got me googling around for weird submarines.
I considered this too and started discounting it when I looked more closely at the paths in the images. The holes aren't perfectly spaced and each hole seems to be at a slightly different angle. But yea, could still be some kind of submarine with an unknown tread or wheel system we've never publicly seen.
Looks an awful lot like the patterns left by woodpeckers who probe wood for critters to eat. Perhaps this is an animal that occasionally checks for sound, chemicals or some electrical field that would indicate a burrowed creature nearby to eat.
Could they be traces left by equipment performing some sort of surveying procedure for the sake of laying submarine communications cable? I know there's a cable somewhere at about 1.5 kilometers below sea level, but I don't know if there's a maximum feasible depth.
Submarine cables lie on the seafloor, apparently at a maximum depth of 11km. I believe that's just the maximum depth they've been laid at though, not necessarily a theoretical maximum.
try google search alerts.
"You can get emails when new results for a topic show up in Google Search. For example, you can get info about news, products, or mentions of your name."
Classified adversarial submarine activity directing seawater into volcanic faults in an attempt to have it make contact with magma, increase pressure and cause artificial natural disasters.
Let me add to my previous comment that it would be prudent for governments around the world to look for these patterns at known seafloor heterogenous fault zones in places where major volcanic, earthquake or tsunami events have occurred in recent history, such as Tonga, Japan and Iceland.
I know this sounds almost conspiracy theory-ish: just looking at the picture, my first guess is man-made. But I'm almost always wrong.
It just looks really perfectly spaced and each one is the same, in a very mechanical way. With all the talk of snooping on undersea data cables, undersea drones, and the continuance of submarine warfare, it seems possible that this is some kind of undisclosed military drone on either side looking for cables?
At 2,5 kilometres or 1,6 miles? Only way that is true is if some cage with points sticking out fell from a ship? Or perhaps wood, that has been rotting away since.
-Edit: That also doesn't explain the multiple tracks and that they are not really aligned. Only saw the 2 pictures, but in the video you can see a lot of other "tracks".
Well, the question here was just "is ln(x) sublinear or not?". You can answer that question with much less work: the second derivative is always negative, so the function must be sublinear. Any function that grows linearly must have a second derivative of zero.
I’m going to sound like a doofus here but… why not just dig them up? It doesn’t sound like they’re particularly rare and digging them up would probably lend a lot of insight as to why they’re made. I guess an argument could be made that it’s not worth harming the organism that made them to figure it out but then why care at all?
I thought I experienced a glitch in the matrix. I had https://www.lofi.cafe/ playing in one tab, muted the tab to play this video and the ambient sound was still there. Turns out the background of the video is almost identical to the one I was listening to on Lofi.cafe...
Could it be a large creature fell to the ocean floor and was digested. At some point its ribcage pierced into the sediment, making the holes, then once that too had been digested only the holes remain?
We would see much more disturbance in the surrounding sediment. A whale fall is quite messy, there's never a stage where a perfectly clean spine is in contact with pristine sediment.
How old are these ? I feel like the chain of a ship's anchor could imprint such a pattern, and wither away if the water is acid enough. Near a volcano for example.
I am not saying it's UFOs but many of the UFOs observed by the US Navy/Airforce were spotted on top of oceans and many have been reported to "disappear" into the ocean. The famous Tic-Tac UFO for example notably disappeared "into the ocean".
I thought this too but these holes don't look very engineered. They look random or organic.
That said, this would be an interesting way to create an 'existence proof' of technological capability and presence if there was something about the holes that permitted ruling out animals or other natural phenomena.
That, or so the printer could more readily grip the crust while Earth was being fabricated. They usually remove those in post-processing but got lazy with these ones.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleodictyon