How Do You Tell If Something Is Dead Or Alive?

typically take a pulse, or check for a heartbeat if you will,

and this is what the mystery is all about, the earths heartbeat, photograph Tumisu/Pixabay, for the past 60 years since it was discovered in 1962, by John Oliver, a researcher at the Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory, Columbia University, the pulse has been generated like clockwork, every 26 seconds, in 1980, Gary Holcomb, a geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, also discovered the mysterious pulse, noting that it was stronger during storms. But for some reason, the two researchers’ discoveries remained virtually unknown for over two decades, until a graduate student at the University of Colorado, Boulder, once again detected the “heartbeat” and decided to look into it, Mike Ritzwoller, a seismologist at the University of Colorado, recently told Discover Magazine that as soon as they laid eyes on the data of then-graduate student Greg Bensen, he and researcher Nikolai Shapiro knew there was something weird about the intermittent pulse. They got to work, analysing the blips from every possible angle, analysing the data, checking their instruments, and even triangulating the source of the pulse to a location in the Gulf of Guinea, off the western coast of Africa, 

Ritzwoller and his team even dug up the research of Oliver and Holcomb and published a study on the mysterious pulse in 2006, but they were never able to explain what it actually was, map Wikimedia Commons, in 2013, Yingjie Xia, a researcher from the Institute of Geodesy and Geophysics in Wuhan, China, theorized that the source of the 26-second pulse was volcanic activity, His theory made sense as well. The origin of the signal was close to a volcano on the island of Sao Tome, so why does the 26 second pulse apperently only occur in the Bight of Bonny “There are certain things that we concentrate on in seismology,” seismologist Doug Wiens explained. “We want to determine the structure beneath the continents, things like that. This is just a little bit outside what we would typically study … [since] it doesn’t have anything to do with understanding the deep structure of the Earth.” I guess the worry is what will happen if the as regular as clockwork, once every 26 second pulse stops? if you like natural mystery's, you might like to look at this one.