Intentional | Audio Identity Blog

If you’re stateside, you’ve likely heard about the lost whales that veered off course for a Sacramento pit stop before turning around and making it back to the home they call The Pacific. Now that we have our happy ending, curious minds may wonder why does this happen?

The Modesto Bee looked into it:

While some have wondered whether noise drove these two whales inland, experts say they consider it highly unlikely. Yet with sonar linked to beached whales from the Canary Islands to the Bahamas, questions linger about how much we’re disrupting the seas…

Noise levels in the Pacific have been going up about three decibels a decade for 40 years, largely because of shipping, Hildebrand said. It’s safe to assume the background noise was at least 20 decibels lower before modern shipping, he said…

Tens of thousands of species whose hearing we understand poorly have had to adjust, if they can.

It is known that porpoises, dolphins, and the rest of the roughly 80 species lumped together as whales rely on sound because it travels better underwater than light. Many smaller whales make their own sonar, uttering dozens or hundreds of clicks per second and analyzing the returning sound to map what’s ahead, a process called echolocation.

In February I pointed to a similar story about the planet’s soundscapes and their increasing congestion, and this follows a similar line: just like crowded spaces, crowded soundscapes produce real problems. How severe a problem, we’re not yet sure:

While suspicions about noise’s ill effects have been around for at least 30 years, humans are only beginning to grasp how much they’re blundering into this sound-rich world.

When David Mellinger, an Oregon State University specialist in whale acoustics, put underwater microphones deep in the mid-Atlantic, he was startled to find almost constant noise from distant oil and gas exploration, with seismic air guns shot off every 20 seconds to analyze the seabed in search of oil and gas deposits…Air guns, Mellinger and others say, are probably the second largest source of human ocean noise, second to shipping.

This certainly raises some interesting issues with respect to modulation, control and species survival, with my first three questions being somewhat obvious: can, how and should we tone it down?

I’ve lifted liberally from the article to give you the juicier snippets, but the full article’s worth the 3 minutes it takes to read it. Enjoy.

– Noel Franus