Scientists Are Working to Make the Ocean a Quieter Place
The louder things get underwater, the harder it becomes for whales, dolphins, fish, and other species to navigate and communicate with their kind.
Ask anyone living in any city: ours is a cacophonous world. But if you want to really give your ears a workout, try living undersea. As your high-school physics teacher no doubt pointed out, sound travels faster, farther, and deeper in water than in air—water being a denser medium and therefore better capable of transporting audio energy. Which makes the whir of propellers, the thrum of low-frequency sonar, and the seismic boom of deep-sea oil and gas exploration a whole lot louder than they might seem to us land dwellers.
And a lot more harmful. The louder things get underwater, the harder it becomes for whales, dolphins, fish, and other species to navigate and communicate with their kind. In extreme cases, exceptionally loud noises can cause acute tissue damage or even death. Moving away from the noise doesn’t help much, either—it can interfere with the ability to forage, breed, or migrate to other territory, threatening the long-term viability of the species.
A handful of scientists and researchers are hoping to change that by developing a collection of ruckus-reducing ocean technologies. At the University of British Columbia, researchers are injecting fluid to control propeller movement, thus minimizing the noisy stream of bubbles they create. British company Oscar Propulsion is trying to make propellers quieter by punching carefully positioned holes on the tips of the blades.
Governments and port authorities are trying to encourage shippers to keep their hubbub to a minimum too. In July 2023, the UN International Maritime Organization adopted revised nonmandatory guidelines for the reduction of underwater radiated noise from shipping.
The European Union went one step further in March 2024, announcing a regulatory cap on underwater noise from human activities at sea. In Canada, the Port of Vancouver is emphasizing the carrot rather than the stick to solve the problem, offering considerable discounts on harbour dues to ships that meet stringent “quiet
vessel” standards.
Conservation is by no means a new idea. It’s ironic, though, that for all our talk of cherishing trees, mountains, and oceans, we are only now realizing that what might be most valuable about nature is intangible: quiet, darkness, a sense of openness and space. A realization that might lead the way to silent seas—and a peaceful planet.
