You do(n’t) want to know how Sweden and Russia almost came to blows over herring farts
In 1982, several of Sweden’s subs, boats, and helicopters pursued one of these unidentified sources for a whole month, only to come up empty-handed.
This carried on for well over a decade. Every time they picked up an acoustic signal, at great expense, they would search and find nothing but a few bubbles on the sea’s surface.
Sweden couldn’t think why, with the Cold War now over, Russia would continue to provoke them in this manner.
But Russia wasn’t trying to provoke them at all. It was farts.
In 1996, Magnus Wahlberg, a professor at the University of Southern Denmark, became involved in the investigation of the strange signals.
“We were brought into this very secret room under the naval base of Bergen in Stockholm,” he explained in a TEDx Talk in 2012. “We were sitting there with all these officers and they were actually playing these sounds for us. It was the first time any civilian heard the sound.”
He had been imagining it to sound like the ping you hear in films when a submarine is detected or just the noise of a propeller.
“It was nothing at all like that. It sounded like someone frying bacon. Like small air bubbles releasing underwater.”
He and a colleague headed off base and put their heads together to figure out what could be making bubbles on a scale that would make Sweden think it was dealing with a nuclear submarine.
“It turns out herring have a swim bladder, and this swim bladder is connected to the anal duct of the fish,” Wahlberg said. “A herring can squeeze its swim bladder, and that way it can blurt out a small number of bubbles through the anal opening.”
In layman’s terms, they let one rip.
Herrings swim in gigantic schools that can reach several square kilometers and up to 20 meters (65 feet) deep. When something gets near them – say, a hungry school of mackerel or a big fucking submarine on the lookout for Russian spies – it can frighten them, causing them to generate a lot of ass farts. The theory was the Swedish Government were roaming around the ocean looking for Russian submarines, scaring the shit out of the fish and then chasing the bubbles. They were trapped in a fish fart loop.
Wahlberg bought a herring from a shop and applied pressure to the sort of area you’d expect to make a fish fart, and sure enough, it made a sound that was at once very amusing and also confirmation of a scientific theory, like if Archemides had farted the word “eureka”. He took footage of his test to the navy and played it back to them. It was a perfect match for the noise they had been hearing.
The good news was that Sweden wasn’t under threat from Russia, the bad news was it had spent 10 years deploying its fucking *military* in pursuit of fish farts. They thought they had been living under nuclear threat, but they had merely embarrassed some gassy fish, chasing them down after they let one out.
Since they figured out what was and wasn’t fish farts, there have been zero reports of hostile intruders in Swedish waters.
Thus ends the story of Das Toot.‘
There’s probably a lesson to be learnt from all this about not jumping to conclusions, not taking a Russian submarine into Swedish waters in the first place, or maybe just not chasing herring until they fart themselves silly. Mostly, the lesson is to buy James Felton’s book, which you can do here, though other bookshops are available.
Oh, and follow him on Twitter.
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Image Ozan Öztaskiran and Fengyou Wan on Unsplash
