Benjamin Thompson

speaker

746 appearances 10 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 2 Sep

Benjamin Thompson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 10 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 5.

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Nature Podcast · Briefing Chat: The 30 year-legacy of a science icon – Dolly the sheep · 10 Jul 2026 podcast

Because this is kind of high school science, but it had never been actually documented. matched

I did, and this suite of instruments included underwater microphones called hydrophones that can detect sound waves, acoustic beacons, these kind of battery-powered things on stilts that emit and detect undersea sounds. matched

And measuring the sound kind of bouncing between them gives a sense of any changes in distance based on how long it takes for the response to come back. matched

And what happened was a matched

A team of scientists were looking at this one particular mid ocean ridge which is called the South East Indian Ridge, which cuts across the Indian Ocean's floor east to west, sort of roughly, and it separates the Antarctic plate from the Australian plate. matched

Sure, and normally these plates they do pull apart about six centimetres a year. matched

But sometimes in some places there's a bit of a bit of a strain and then they suddenly they burst apart and these things, as you might expect, they're accompanied by earthquakes, all sorts of stuff going on. matched

A fairly epic event. matched

And so these epic events are what the scientists were hoping they could measure and they matched

Struck gold, I guess. matched

On the twenty sixth of april twenty twenty four, these hydrophones started to pick up seismic tremors, then over the next couple of days the beacon data showed that the stations were moving apart. matched

And they moved apart a lot. matched

They moved apart two meters in a few days, as opposed to the regular six centimeters a year. matched

I can't imagine what a hundred and sixty million cubic tons of slowly cooling lava would look like. matched

But yeah, epic. matched

And it's an interesting one because as I say, this is the first time this has been seen. matched

And as you alluded to there, we don't really know a great deal about the very, very deep part of the ocean, but this does give a sense of some of these enormous processes that are going on that helps make the Earth I suppose. matched

Yeah. matched

Absolutely right. matched

Well let's leave it there then for this week's briefing chat. matched

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