The Lake Was Passing Gas. It Took 90 Years to Prove.

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." The cannon-like boom erupts without warning and rolls across the water like distant thunder. Scientists just figured out what's been pulling the trigger.

Seneca Lake, the deepest of New York's Finger Lakes, sits at the heart of one of America's longest-running natural mysteries. To visitors it looks like any other idyllic summer retreat, surrounded by wineries, farms and wooded shores, its waters a calm blue stretching nearly 38 miles. The Seneca Tribe believed the sounds were the angry shouts of Manitou, the Great Spirit. European settlers attributed them to the ghosts of Seneca warriors still fighting for their land. James Fenimore Cooper turned it into myth in his 1850 story The Lake Guns.

The answer turned out to be geology, not ghosts, and it came from a survey that wasn't even looking for it. Between 2018 and 2024, scientists using sonar to map shipwrecks stumbled upon more than 140 enormous craters at the bottom of the lake. Researchers traced the booms to methane gas trapped beneath the lakebed: pressure builds under layers of sediment until it bursts through, releasing a giant gas bubble. When that bubble hits the surface and pops, it creates a shockwave powerful enough to sound like cannon fire rolling across the water.

Geologist Herman Fairchild had said as much in 1934, attributing the noise to bubbles of gas escaping from sandstone. It took 91 years, 140 craters and modern sonar to prove Fairchild right.

The lake didn't have a voice. It had indigestion.

Read the full story at Popular Mechanics, June 2, 2026

Hot Take: Ninety plus years to confirm 'it's farts' is the longest peer review process in scientific history, and somehow still faster than most insurance claims.