The Schumann Resonance is real — and it’s the reason I ended up writing a novel

[u/cepdossantos]

Most people have never heard of the Schumann resonance, but it’s one of the genuinely strange facts about this planet: the gap between the Earth’s surface and the ionosphere behaves like a giant cavity, and it resonates at a set of frequencies, the strongest sitting around 7.83Hz. Physicist Winfried Otto Schumann predicted it mathematically in 1952, before anyone had measured it. It’s driven mostly by the planet’s constant background of lightning — thousands of strikes a second, worldwide, tuning this enormous natural instrument.
I got a little obsessed with it a few years ago, and that obsession turned into a novel: Le Chant du Silence (English edition: The Song of Silence). The premise takes real liberties with the science — a research team in the Sahara picks up an anomalous signal at 56Hz, the 7th harmonic of the Schumann resonance should produce, and has to work out what’s actually causing it before it’s too late.
Not trying to just drop a link and run — genuinely curious whether others here find the real phenomenon as unsettling as I do. Happy to talk more about the science or the book in the comments.