Picture this: you’re standing near a massive glacier on a crystal-clear day, enjoying the serene beauty of this ancient ice giant. The silence seems almost sacred. Yet beneath the surface and deep within the ice, something haunting is stirring – a symphony of eerie sounds that scientists are only beginning to understand. These mysterious noises aren’t random background noise; they’re actually nature’s early warning system, telling us about impending collapse and dramatic changes happening right before our eyes.
The Dawn Chorus of Destruction
When you think of glaciers, silence probably comes to mind. However, during the day, the ice is quiet and still. But after sunset, the scientists wrote, temperature changes likely cause exposed ice to shrink, fracturing it as individual regions warp away from one another. The cracks aren’t necessarily visible from the surface, but the noises they make were loud enough to keep the research team up at night.
This nocturnal awakening creates what researchers describe as an almost otherworldly experience. It is a very dynamic process and you get lots of crackles, clicks and stuttering sounds as the water resonates in the ice caves. There are even resonant droning pitches that can sound airy and light or deep and ominous. The glacier transforms from a sleeping giant into something that seems almost alive and breathing.
The Breakfast Cereal Effect
One of the most unexpected discoveries about glacier sounds is how familiar they can be. The sounds that they produce can be as comforting as your breakfast cereal or as terrifying as a creature from Jurassic Park. Ice Sizzles can sound like Rice Krispies or Pepsi. These sizzling sounds occur when ancient air bubbles trapped in the ice finally burst free.
The hydrophones also recorded the sounds of air bubbles bursting from the glacier ice as it melted. Melting glacier ice is described as “more treble,” said Deane, noting that it sounds like popping or “bacon frying” if you’re close to it and more like “hissing static” if it’s far away. This crackling symphony happens continuously as the ice gives up air that’s been locked away for thousands of years.
Ice Quakes: The Glacier’s Heartbeat
Ice Quakes are the first indication that a crevasse is forming but they don’t sound like the low rumbling of earthquakes. Fractures that cause ice quakes make a hissing or traveling cracking sound which sometimes comes from within the glacier, even though no crack is visible on the surface.
These ice quakes represent the glacier’s internal struggle against the forces trying to tear it apart. A cryoseism, ice quake or frost quake, is a seismic event caused by a sudden cracking action in frozen soil or rock saturated with water or ice, or by stresses generated at frozen lakes. This stress builds up until relieved explosively in the form of a cryoseism. The sounds can be so intense that they register on seismic equipment from miles away.
The Thunder Before the Fall
Calving of glaciers is often accompanied by a loud cracking or booming sound before blocks of ice up to 60 metres (200 ft) high break loose and crash into the water. This thunderous warning system gives observers precious seconds to prepare for what’s coming next.
Thomas tells of one occasion when he and his guides were at the front of a glacier, and they heard a very loud and deep bass sound. “We felt it first in our chests before we heard it and I thought ‘oh no, do we need to get out of here?’ It was like an earthquake and it set off all my instinctual run reflexes. The experience shows how these sounds trigger our most primal survival instincts, even before our conscious mind processes what’s happening.
The Underwater Symphony
An iceberg breaking off an ice cliff and falling into the water sounds like a cracking, rumbling splash. This underwater acoustic signature has become crucial for scientists studying glacier retreat. What we are actually recording is a sound cacophony, a mixture of noise made by all the chunks of ice floating around and the noise made by the glacier itself.
The underwater sounds tell an even more dramatic story. Our analysis of the sound of a large calving suggested that glaciers can generate some of the loudest underwater sounds in the Arctic Ocean. The volume places calving in Greenland in the same category as the most powerful natural sounds possible in the ocean after undersea volcanic eruptions and earthquakes. These underwater booms can travel thousands of miles through the ocean.
Minutes to Escape: Nature’s Warning System
For example, in our research area in northwest Greenland, local Inuit will rush to protect their boats if they hear rumbling from massive glaciers several kilometres away. From experience, they know that destructive ocean waves may arrive minutes later.
This indigenous knowledge reveals the practical importance of understanding glacier sounds. No one can predict when the calving might occur, but when it does, it can trigger a massive “tsunami” wave. The sound serves as nature’s early warning system, giving people precious minutes to reach safety before the waves arrive.
The Alien Language of Ice
They make all kinds of sounds covering a huge dynamic range, from cracking and popping to booming and tinkling and a multitude of sounds in between. Indeed, they are so noisy that they almost seem alive and breathing, possibly even talking to us in some alien language that we don’t understand.
The water starts melting again and the sound builds over three or four hours and changes from dripping to gurgles, to cracking and fizzling. The glaciers go to sleep at night and then wake again in the morning. This daily cycle creates a rhythm that researchers describe as eerily lifelike, as if the glacier has its own daily routine of sleeping and waking.
Technological Eavesdropping on Ice
We drop our instruments to the bottom of a glacier fjord a few hundred metres deep – and flee. Weeks or months later, we summon our instruments to the surface using an acoustic command. Later, on a computer, we can explore an underwater cacophony of sounds composed of characteristic iceberg booms, degassing icebergs, boats and marine mammals.
Modern hydrophone technology allows scientists to safely monitor glaciers from a distance. Low cost hydrophones are easily deployed, and acoustic data can be gathered continuously for several months or longer with a high sampling rate and low maintenance. Acoustic measurements are not hampered by conditions such as fog, cloud coverage, precipitation, or humidity. This means researchers can monitor glacier behavior in conditions that would make visual observation impossible.
The Volume of Destruction
I was particularly surprised on one occasion by recorded calving sounds that lasted almost half an hour and were so loud that colleagues from neighbouring laboratories and floors thought an earthquake was happening as I replayed it. The sheer volume of these sounds demonstrates the incredible forces at work when glaciers collapse.
Earlier studies reported that disintegrating tabular icebergs near Antarctica were also extremely loud and could be “heard” thousands of kilometres away, equivalent to noise from more than 200 supertankers. To put this in perspective, imagine the sound of hundreds of massive ships all running their engines at once – that’s the acoustic power released when a glacier calves.
The Sound Signature of Climate Change
By comparing the sound recordings with time-lapse video, the researchers were able to match up certain sounds with certain types of iceberg calving. The researchers can even differentiate among the sounds made when the ice starts to crack, when it detaches and when it begins to surface, creating waves and splashes.
Each type of collapse creates its own unique acoustic fingerprint. For example, icefalls that slide and occur above the water create more high-frequency sounds from the friction of ice against ice. In underwater icefalls, Glowacki said, low-frequency sounds are more frequent. Scientists can now identify different types of glacier collapse just by listening to the sounds they make, giving us a new tool to monitor climate change in real time.
Years of research have revealed that glaciers are far from the silent, static ice monuments we once imagined. They’re dynamic, noisy, and constantly communicating through an intricate language of sounds that scientists are only beginning to decode. From the breakfast cereal crackles of melting ice to the thunderous roars that precede massive collapses, these sounds serve as both warning systems and windows into the complex processes reshaping our planet.
The next time you hear about glaciers in the news, remember that behind every statistic about ice loss is a dramatic acoustic story unfolding in some of the world’s most remote places. These eerie sounds aren’t just scientific curiosities – they’re the soundtrack to climate change itself, playing out in frequencies that travel across oceans and through time.
What do you think about these haunting glacier sounds? Tell us in the comments.
Hi, I’m Andrew, and I come from India. Experienced content specialist with a passion for writing. My forte includes health and wellness, Travel, Animals, and Nature. A nature nomad, I am obsessed with mountains and love high-altitude trekking. I have been on several Himalayan treks in India including the Everest Base Camp in Nepal, a profound experience.
