Some whale songs can be given by scientists valuable information about the geography of the ocean, said a study published Thursday in the journal Science. What’s more, their songs can be used as a form of seismic testing, which uses sound to map the ocean floor. Shapes of this technology can be harmful to whales and other marine life.
If only we had listened to whales, we might not have had to develop certain practices that hurt them.
“I’m not entirely surprised by this investigation,” said Michael Jasny, director of the Marine Mammal Protection Project at NRDC. And if you had asked me to guess which animal this study used, I would have said fin whales. F.in whale sounds have been mistaken for a regular geological moan for several years … It took oceanographers a while to figure out that this was actually an animal. “
Jasny, who was not involved in this research, noted that scientists and some industries that rely on seismic testing have been studying how natural sounds, including geological and animal sounds, can be replaced by human-made.
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Fin whales can scream quite loudly hydrologically. Their calls can reach up to 189 decibels-louder than fireworks or gunshots and similar to sounds from large ships, the study explains. They are also remarkably consistent: F.in whales string individual calls into long, low-frequency songs that can take hours and take short breaks only to surface for air.
This consistent sound, the study found, contains valuable information. Researchers looked at six separate numbers, ranging between 2.5 and 5 hours, of individual whales caught at ocean floor seismometer stations off the Oregon coast, which were initially installed to track seismic activity along a fault zone.
“The powerful sound waves produced by these songs echo and break through the layers of rock beneath the station,” the study notes. These recordings allowed the researchers to collect information about both the sediment lining the floor and the crust underneath. “Our study shows that animal sounds are useful not only for studying the animals themselves, but also for examining the environment in which they live,” the authors write.
It is useful to know what is happening on the ocean floor for several reasons. Unfortunately, the search for oil and gas reserves along the ocean floor is one of the most common –and most disruptiveuse of the technology. To survey the sea floor, the fossil fuel industry uses seismic cannons that fire incredibly loud blasts, alarmingly marine mammals that have evolved to use sound as their primary navigator underwater.
Seismic cannons “are towed behind vessels on the surface of the water,” explained Jasny. “The sounds they generate have to go down through the water column hundreds or thousands of meters, penetrate the sea floor, penetrate layers of sediment –5, 10 miles from what the industry is interested in-and then the sound has to come up again and be received by the ship to send information worth millions or billions of dollars. “
“Air pistols fire about every 10 seconds or so, weeks or months on end. IIt’s just tearing the fabric of ocean life, ”he continued. “There are studies that indicate it can mask whale songs, particularly fin and humpback whales, thousands of miles from the source –so a single seismic survey could disrupt fin whale breeding. “
The study is quick to note that calling fin whales is unlikely to replace these types of high-powered seismic surveys. Fortunately, with global oil prices plunging and the search for new offshore reserves becoming a riskier financial gamble, the industry has faced a series of backlashes in its quest to find more oil. including national legislation to prohibit the practice in certain areas and concentrated local opposition
Still, there are other uses for seismic technology that don’t serve fossil fuels and that could be helped by new research into the use of natural sounds. Offshore construction work, for example including the construction of offshore wind turbines and other infrastructure for renewable energy sources, must build on data about what is on the ocean floor in order to place projects correctly.
“Overall, there’s a lot of potential in using a whole host of sounds that are both geological and biological …[this is] an exciting study, ”said Jasny. “It stimulates you to think about the sounds that animals make as another engine of human exploration. There is so much we don’t know about the oceans. “