Some whale songs can give scientists valuable information on the geography of the ocean, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Science. What’s more, their songs can be used as a form of seismic testing, which uses explosions of sound to map the ocean floor. Forms of this technology can be harmful to whales and other marine life.
If we had just listened more closely to whales, we might not have needed to develop certain practices that hurt them.
“I’m not entirely surprised by this study,” said Michael Jasny, director of the Marine Mammal Protection Project at NRDC. ‘And if you were to ask me to guess which animal this study uses, I would have said fin whales. Fwhale calls have been mistaken for a regular geological moan for several years … It took a while before oceanographers realized it was actually an animal. ‘
Jasny, who was not involved in this study, noted that scientists and some industries that rely on seismic tests have been investigating the replacement of natural sounds for years, including geological sounds and animal sounds.man-made people.
G / O Media can get a commission
Fin whales can scream quite loudly hydraulically speaking. Their calls can reach up to 189 decibels –louder than firefighters or gunshots and similar to sounds made by large ships, the study explains. They are also remarkably consistent: Fa whale string individual calls together into long, low frequency songs it can take hours and take short breaks just to the surface for air.
This persistent noise, the study found, stored valuable information in it. Researchers looked at six separate songs, ranging from 2.5 to 5 hours, from individual whales caught at seabed seismometer stations off the coast of Oregon, initially installed to monitor seismic activity along a fault zone.
“The powerful sound waves that make these songs resound and break through the low rock beneath the station,” the study says. The researchers were able to use these surveys to gather information about the sediment along the floor as well as the crust beneath it. “Our study shows that vocalization of animals is not only useful for studying the animals themselves, but also for investigating the environment in which they live,” the authors write.
It is useful to know what is going on on the seabed for various reasons. Unfortunately, the exploration of oil and gas reserves along the seabed has become one of the most common –and most disruptive—use of technology. To investigate the seabed, the fossil fuel industry uses seismic guns that explode alarmingly hard marine mammals that developed to use sound as their primary underwater navigator.
Seismic guns “are being towed behind vessels on the water surface,” Jasny explained. ‘The sounds they generate must descend hundreds or thousands of meters through the column of water, penetrate the seabed, penetrate low sediment –5, 10 kilometers down to where the industry is interested-and then the sound must rise again and be received by the vessel to transmit information worth millions or billions of dollars. ”
“Air rifles go off about every 10 seconds or so for weeks or months on end. It only tears the dust of ocean life, ”he continued. ‘There are studies that suggest it could mask whale songs, especially fin whales and humpback whales, thousands of miles from the source –thus, a single seismic survey may interfere with the breeding of fin whales. ‘
In the study, it is quickly noted that the attack of fin whales is unlikely to replace these types of powerful seismic surveys. Fortunately, as the price of oil falls worldwide and the exploration of new foreign reserves becomes a riskier financial bet, the industry has suffered a series of setbacks in its quest to find more oil, inclusive national legislation to prohibit the practice in certain areas and concentrated local opposition.
There are still other uses for seismic technology that do not serve fossil fuels and this can be helped by new research on the use of natural sounds. Foreign construction work, for example, including the construction of offshore wind turbines and other renewable energy infrastructure, must build on data on what is on the ocean floor in order to properly recruit projects.
‘In general, there is a lot of potential in the use of a number of sounds that are geological as well as biological …[this is] an exciting study, ‘Jasny said. ‘It makes you think about the sounds that animals make as another driver of human exploration. There is so much we do not know about the oceans. ”