Ear to the Ground

[intention]

Well, Cecil declined to answer, so it’s up to the teeming masses … here’s my correspondence with Cecil:

I wrote:

Oh great Cecil, fount of all knowledge, in the Western movies I see the Injuns put their ear to the ground to hear the riders coming from far away. I tried this as a kid, and all I got was dirt in my ear … can you actually hear from afar like this, or it it just a trick to get kid’s ears dirty?

Many thanks,

w.

That got no answer, so I wrote:

Dang, Cecil, this is embarrassing … after I’ve boasted to my daughter that you’re the world’s smartest human, and that you answer questions from the readers … you don’t answer her question to me. Now I’m sitting here, holding my Richard and trying to explain the lapse …

HELP!

Here’s my question again …

w.

Again, no joy. I followed this with:

This is getting depressing … here’s the question again.

Please answer, or tell me you won’t.

w.

Finally, Dex took pity on me, and wrote:

My apologies. I try to respond to most of the emails when I screen Cecil’s mail, but if I’m rushed or there’s a lot of them, I sometimes don’t. That’s why I said “probably.” My apologies if I didn’t.

Thanks for writing,
Dex

So, there 'tis, Cecil won’t or can’t answer … perhaps the Teeming Masses© know the answer …

w.

[engineer_comp_geek]

Hey, give the guy a break. It’s not the teeming dozens that are sending him letters, it’s the teeming millions, remember? Give him ten years or so and I’m sure he’ll get to your letter too.

I can tell you from experience that you can tell if a train is coming by putting your ear to the rail. It doesn’t give you that much more warning than just listening for the train (while standing) though. Based on that, I have a hard time believing that anyone could hear a small group of riders on horseback, as is the typical Hollywood version. I can however believe that you could hear a herd of buffalo, if the ground is sufficiently hard in the area to conduct the sound fairly well. You’d probably have to look for a patch of bedrock that had been exposed by the elements, otherwise you’re just going to get an ear full of dirt.

[intention]

Hey, I didn’t say Cecil should answer my question in preference to anyone elses. I just wanted to get some kind of reply, not just drop my email into a black hole. I know Cecil gets lots of questions, but a “Got your question, sorry, ask the teeming millions” reply would have been nice.

w.

[Bosda_Di_Chi_of_Tricor]

The idea, apparently, is that vibrations of large numbers of horses hooves will be audile through the ground.

Well…given tall grass, dense bushes, or tree growth, this may be a plan. The vibration would travel further than your line of sight.

Way out on the Plains, or in the Desert…nix. You could see further than that.

[Speaker_for_the_Dead]

If one were on a winding mountain trail, it seems like it would work, since you have all of the prerequisites: terrain limiting the line of site and hard ground (rock, really) to conduct the sound. Right?

[CookingWithGas]

Elephants can send and detect vibrations in the ground over long distances, though I don’t know if people can.

[Gfactor]

Good Vibrations: How Sound is Created
Every sound we hear is produced by something vibrating. The vibrations have enough energy to push against the surrounding air or water, making that medium also vibrate. These vibrations travel in every direction. When they reach our ears, they make our eardrums vibrate, and that is how we hear them. Sound travels slower than light, so we see a flash of lightning before we hear the thunder produced at the exact same moment. Most sounds we hear travel through gas or liquid, but sound can also travel through solids. That’s why you could put your ear to the ground and hear galloping hooves, or to the rails of a train track to hear an approaching train.

http://www.learner.org/jnorth/tm/spring/PicturingSound.html

[intention]

@CookingWithGas

Elephants can send and detect vibrations in the ground over long distances, though I don’t know if people can.

Many thanks, Cooking, that was a most detailed and marvelous article. Seems like it might be possible after all. Maybe I’ll borrow my wife’s stethoscope and see what I can find out. (I got enough dirty ears pretending to do this as a kid.)

My great thanks to everyone who answered.

w.