Why Is This Lake ‘Burping’?

Jim Mead was fishing 30 years ago on Seneca Lake, the largest of the Finger Lakes of central New York, when he experienced what he believes was the phenomenon that has confounded the region for hundreds of years.

He recalled leaning over the side of his boat and seeing something in the water about 20 feet away. A large bubble, which he described as three feet in diameter, shot up from the water’s depths and exploded at the surface with a loud bang.

“It made this really deep boom sound,” said Mr. Mead, 66, who captains pontoon boat cruises to Finger Lakes wineries. “It didn’t make much of a water splash, strangely, but it was a big boom!”

New York State is home to its share of legends. Rip Van Winkle of the Catskill Mountains. The Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow. There is the Curse of Cohoes Falls on the Mohawk River and the monster of Lake Champlain.

Then there are what are known as the “Seneca Guns” and “Seneca Drums” — intermittent and inexplicable booms that people living near Seneca Lake have reported hearing for centuries. While these noises have been well documented, making them more mystery than myth, their source is shrouded in lore.

The native Seneca people attributed the sounds to a deity furious with a warrior who violated sacred hunting grounds. American folklore spun a different tale: The booms were the drumbeat of a ghost of a Revolutionary War soldier in search of his regiment.

James Fenimore Cooper described the phenomena in his 1850 short story “The Lake Gun,” writing, “It is a sound resembling the explosion of a heavy piece of artillery that can be accounted for by none of the known laws of nature.”

“It’s a longstanding mysterious phenomenon that no one knows the answer to,” said Tim Morin, an associate professor at the State University of New York’s College of Environmental Science and Forestry and one of three principal investigators of the sounds. “We think we know what explains it. Now we’ve got to prove it.”

The prevailing theory behind the booms rests on an explanation posited in 1934 by Herman Fairchild, a co-founder of the Geological Society of America.

Writing in the academic journal Science under the headline “Silencing the ‘Guns’ of Seneca Lake,” Mr. Fairchild explained that bubbles of natural gas buried in the earth were escaping through the lake bed into the water. “The inevitable explosion at the surface, along with the reaction of the displaced water, would produce the low-pitch, dull sound heard infrequently in the southern part of the Seneca Valley,” he wrote.

But Fairchild never tested the hypothesis, which he credited to a geologist and engineer at a local gas company.

“Their direction is vague, and like the foot of a rainbow, they are always ‘somewhere else’ when the observer moves to the locality from which they seem to come,” The Geneva Daily Times newspaper reported in May 1934.

That changed last year with the surprising results of a sonar survey of Seneca Lake that, to the shock of the scientific community, revealed a lake bed resembling the cratered surface of the moon.

The survey, an initiative of several state agencies that sought to map the lake and capture high-resolution images of shipwrecks, found the lake floor dotted with 144 craters that stretched for miles at the southern end of the lake. Some of the craters are two football fields wide.

“They were a surprise to everyone,” Mr. Morin said. “But if these craters, or what we call pockmarks, are formed like we think, methane or other geologic gases are penetrating the ground surface and bursting like a big pimple.”

Their work was funded with a $12,700 grant from the Department of Environmental Conservation and the state’s Water Resources Institute. The mission, as explained by the agencies, is to “study recently discovered holes in the bottom of Seneca Lake to determine if they’re releasing methane and other chemicals that might explain the mysterious booming sounds heard on the lake for centuries.” The researchers said it could be months before they are able to analyze the data from their water samples and draw a conclusion.

None of the researchers on the boat have ever heard the lake boom. But like seemingly everyone in the area, they know someone who knows someone who has.

“On our very first day, someone came up to us and asked what we were doing, and we told him, and he was, like, ‘Oh, yeah, I heard those years ago,’” said Erin Hassett, a doctoral candidate at SUNY ESF.

Indeed, The Buffalo Times, a former daily newspaper, reported in 1903 the story of William Prosser, who was injured by “a flash and a deafening roar” when he struck a match to light his pipe while sailing on Seneca Lake.

“The next thing Mr. Prosser knew was that he and his boat were flying through the air, and that he landed among trees on the shore a hundred yards distant in a bruised and bleeding condition,” the report said.

“We have sort of laughed over the Seneca Drums,” the publisher, Roger Reinhart, was quoted as saying, “but I am telling you that this is the real thing.”

Bill Billings, 65, grew up on the east side of the lake and recalled hearing them as a teenager in the 1970s.

“I recall late on a summer afternoon occasionally we’d hear what some people describe as a boom,” he said. “My description, honest to God, would be more like a whump.” He added: “And it would be loud.”

Perplexing noises emanating from bodies of water are not unique to Seneca Lake. Residents of coastal North Carolina have long reported hearing mysterious booms. In Belgium, such sounds are known as “mistpouffers,” or fog belches. The Bay of Bengal has its “Bansal guns.” In the Apennine Mountains of Italy, locals call them “brontidi,” as in thunder.

Scientists generally attribute the noises to natural phenomena like earthquakes, rock bursts, natural gas, falling meteorites and plain old thunder. But their true source remains a mystery.

Jed Sparks, a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Cornell and a principal investigator on the Seneca Lake project, said the lore surrounding the research “can’t get any cooler.”

“When you first move here, it’s one of those things you just sort of hear about,” Mr. Sparks said. “It’s the Seneca Drums or Seneca Guns, and it’s in everybody’s zeitgeist, in their mind from their childhood.”