Mystery Booms Plaguing California Residents Finally Have a Source

First Posted: Aug 08, 2015 08:07 AM EDT

Mysterious booms have plagued the residents of El Dorado County in California for some time now. While some have speculated what the cause of these booms has been, it's remained a mystery until now.

Residents have reported that the booms aren't as crisp as a gunshot, and instead sound more like an aerial bomb. A few have speculated that it could be the result of work occurring in an underground mine.

It seems, though, that these aren't the case. The mystery booms are actually the result of the Hawthorne Army Depot destroying obsolete munitions on weekdays. This base is located 100 miles away in the Nevada desert.

"I can't explain all the physics involved, but the atmosphere is bouncing in response to the energy and it's reflecting and bouncing (the sound) back down," said Glen White, a science instructor at Columbia College outside Sonora, in an interview with Phys.org. "The really odd part is people fairly close to the source of the energy, the explosions, aren't hearing it. The sound goes over them."

White and the SMU team actually wanted to calibrate four sensor stations, using the known source of daily explosions at Hawthorne That's when they found that the blasts heard by California residents came from Hawthorne. Sound actually carries fairly well in the summer months, which explains why so many residents have been hearing the explosions.

It seems as if the mystery behind the strong "booms" that have plagued California residents have been solved.

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TagsSound, California, Sounds