âWeâd like the word soundscape to become a lot better known. Sound is light in the oceans. It illuminates the ocean for many animals. They use it to communicate, to hunt, and can be harmed by noise at excess,â Ausubel said.
He and colleagues â including specialists at St Andrews â plan to expand the hydrophone network, particularly in the southern hemisphere, to more than 500 devices. Using modelling and data collaborations with shipping companies and other ocean users, they hope to produce a global map of ocean sound within the coming years. This should reveal important patterns, such as increases in noise along shipping lanes and near oilfields and windfarms, which could prove as important for ocean health and regulation as roadside air pollution monitoring, or water-contamination measurements near factories.
The Covid-19 lockdown has produced the quietest year for the world’s oceans in recent memory, according to a group of scientists working on a global map of underwater soundscapes. Noise pollution from ship engines, trawling activities, oil platforms, subsea mining and other human sources declined significantly last spring, say the researchers, who are part of a collaborative network of 231 non-military hydrophones. They believe the relative hush.
Pandemic made 2020 the year of the quiet ocean , say scientists msn.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from msn.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
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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.