For centuries, something beneath Seneca Lake in upstate New York has been making a very loud, very disturbing noise. Locals called it the “Seneca Guns,” a cannon-like boom that erupted without warning and rolled across the water like distant thunder. The Seneca people once said it was the voice of an angry spirit. Early settlers blamed ghostly soldiers still fighting the Revolution. James Fenimore Cooper turned it into myth in his 1850 story The Lake Guns. Every few years, the lake would roar again, then fall silent, as if taunting anyone who tried to explain it.
Now, after hundreds of years and a stack of wild theories, scientists finally have an answer. According to The New York Times, a joint research team from the State University of New York and Cornell University traced the mysterious sound to methane gas erupting from beneath the lakebed. Pressure builds underground for years until it bursts through the sediment, sending a giant bubble to the surface. When that bubble explodes into the air, it triggers a shockwave that sounds like a literal cannon blast.
Scientists Unravel Centuries-Old Mystery Of Explosive Booms Coming From New York Lake
The discovery began accidentally. Between 2018 and 2024, researchers conducted a sonar survey of the lake to map long-lost shipwrecks. Instead, they found more than 140 deep craters, each several hundred meters wide, scattered across the bottom of Seneca Lake. When they collected sediment and water samples, they found traces of methane and other gases—exactly what German geologist Herman Fairchild predicted back in 1934. It just took modern equipment to prove him right.
Researcher Tim Morin told The New York Times that the eruptions behave “like a big pimple,” a line that probably won’t make it into any tourism brochures. The lake, the largest and deepest of the Finger Lakes, holds enough water to amplify the blast for miles. The sound can be startling, but officials say it poses no danger.
The study also sheds light on how much gas is trapped beneath New York’s ancient glacial lakes. Similar methane bursts elsewhere have caused deadly oxygen displacement events, though scientists emphasize that Seneca Lake’s activity appears limited and stable.
After centuries of ghost stories, the mystery has boiled down to geology and gas. The “Guns of Seneca” aren’t supernatural, just nature clearing its throat. Still, for anyone who’s heard that boom echo off the hills, it’s easy to understand why people once believed the lake was telling them something.
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