Kate Wing's Blog
Can you hear me now?
April 9, 2008
Posted by Kate Wing in Reviving the World's Oceans
We at NRDC have a long history of worrying about the sound in the sea. When your life's aquatic, your ability to detect vibrations can mean life or death or lunch. You might even want to make some joyful noise of your own, if you're a toadfish on the make or a cusk eel, and what a shame if that call is drowned out by the roar of a ship engine.
Luckily, more and more scientists are listening to the sea beyond a handful of acoustic oceanographers. Researchers at the Wegener Insititute for Polar Sciences dropped hydrophones under the Antarctic ice as a way to get a baseline of a quiet sea. Only it's not exactly silent. After only half an hour of listening I caught the crash of an iceberg calving, and possibly some animal sounds, though those were hard to make out above the sirens wailing past my office window. Good thing I wasn't using those sounds to navigate.
Alexis Madrigal at Wired points to a few other sites where you can hear underwater sounds, and perhaps the researchers at the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary will make their recordings available to the public when their buoys pop up to the surface. SBNMS hopes not only to calculate a "noise budget" in their busy area just off Boston, but also make progress in counting fish with sound. Which is much easier on the fish than catching them.
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