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New Delhi, April 9
Travel and economic slowdown due to the Covid-19 pandemic have combined to put the brakes on shipping, seafloor exploration, and many other human activities in the ocean, creating a unique moment to begin a time-series study of the impacts of sound on marine life.
A community of scientists has identified more than 200 non-military ocean hydrophones worldwide and hopes to make the most of the unprecedented opportunity to pool their recorded data into the 2020 quiet ocean assessment and to help monitor the ocean soundscape long into the future.
They aim for a total of 500 hydrophones capturing the signals of whales and other marine life while assessing the racket levels of human activity.