Name: Drowning in Noise: Sound Waves and Sea Creatures | National Geographic
Uploaded: 2025-02-11T21:01:10.000Z
Duration: 4 min 37 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

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Sound travels differently underwater, creating pressure waves that can traverse vast distances without losing power.

Many marine creatures use sound to navigate, find a mate, protect their environment and communicate with each other.

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But out at sea we humans are creating a cacophony of noise that can be dangerous and deafening and even deadly to some sea creatures.

Preserving marine ecosystems is just one of the reasons that Prada Group has partnered with UNESCO-IOC to create the Sea Beyond educational program, driving a new wave of action to understand our ocean and protect it.

As a Sea Beyonder and as an ocean educator, I often use sound and music to bring the underwater world to life.

Beneath the surface, an ocean is a rich acoustic environment.

But we humans are disrupting that environment.

Sea Beyond Do you hear these little clicks and the little knistering sounds?

These are actually from crustaceans and small animals that live down there.

There's the whole world of sounds underwater.

Whistles are usually dolphins or marine mammals.

Whales use sounds for communication and at sea with sounds as well.

So it's for echolocation, to find their prey, to find their way around in the deep fjords.

You know, whales have been evolving for millions of years in a very quiet ocean.

And then the humans came along and introduced machines and all of a sudden, within 50 years, this ocean became a very noisy place.

So what kind of noise are we talking about?

We mostly hear shipping noise, but what is very devastating is actually the noise that is produced by seismic surveys looking for oil and gas.

If an animal, especially a marine mammal, are hit by that sound wave, then tissue can rupture and they bleed internally.

Researchers have found out that zooplankton in a radius of 1.2 kilometers dies every time these blasts go off, every eight seconds, 24 hours.

We are creating this overwhelming cacophony underwater and it's impacting the entire web of life in the ocean.

There are alternatives to seismic air guns and I think that should be more investigated.

So seismic air guns search for oil and gas.

They take out the oil and from oil, plastic is being produced.

There's all these connections and it all starts with seismic surveys.

So if we care about this, then we can reduce our consumption of daily products that are harmful.

Artificial intelligence is helping us to understand how noise travels underwater so that we can move shipping routes away from the critical habitats of the whales.

At the same time, advances in technology is allowing us to build quieter ship engines.

There are positive steps we can take, but we need more attention on the issue.

Amazing people like Heike and her students are diving deep into this research, developing the knowledge we need to find solutions.

All the creatures on this planet depend on oceans for their survival and that includes us, which is why Prada Group created Sea Beyond in partnership with UNESCO-IOC to help to support the next generation of ocean custodians and to help us all see beyond to a blue future.