Dave Munroe/National Science Foundation In the days of sail,
sailors dreaded rounding the Horn, the southernmost tip of South
America, because of the violence of the storms in Drake Passage.
Geologists at Washington University think that water waves
excited by these and other storms in the Southern Atlantic Ocean
may be converted to seismic waves off the west coast of Africa
and travel through the solid earth to seismometers, which pick
them up as "noise." If you wander up to a seismograph in a
museum, unless you are lucky enough to be there right during an
earthquake, all you will see is a small wiggly signal being
recorded. What’s inside the wiggles is called noise by
seismologists, because the signal is always there and originates
from the normal activity of the earth between the jolts caused
by large earthquakes. Up until recently, few researchers paid
any heed to these apparently boring signals – analyzing them, it
was thought, would be like critiquing elevator music. But now a
seismologist and his advis