Alexis Yeap 3/31/25
Have you ever had a terrible upstairs neighbor who was blasting music at ungodly hours? Well imagine that but 100 times worse. That’s the reality for marine life in a globalized society. With the copious amount of boats on the ocean, sonar being used daily, and various oil drilling related activities going on, it’s a lot. But all of this is happening under the sea, it’s not that loud, is it?
Fun fact, sound travels faster and further underwater compared to the air, and in an ecosystem where there’s not a whole lot of light, sound based adaptations come in pretty handy. From the mighty blue whale, to the mysterious giant squid, and everything in between. Unfortunately the amount of ocean noise has increased dramatically due to globalization at a rate of 3 decibels every 10 years. While at face value those numbers may not sound like much, but like pH decibels are also logarithmic making this an exponentially worsening issue. This is also not helped by the fact that ocean acidification increases ocean noise.
Ocean noise has been known to cause chronic stress and physical injuries among marine animals. As well as making feeding, mating, survival, communication extremely harder. For example when exposed to loud sounds, fish bladders have a tendency to explode. This loss of swim bladders destroys a fish’s control over their buoyancy, permanently crippling them and possibly causing death. Additionally, since the 1960s use of more powerful sonar. More and more pods of beaked whales are beaching themselves because of panic. Nowadays, whales have to communicate at different frequencies just to be heard, which is kinda like yelling. None of this should be happening. So how do we fix it?
There’s still a lot we don’t understand about ocean noise’s effects, but we do know how to solve it. Which is to reduce sound in boats, machines, sonar, etc. If we get boats to slow down they’ll be a lot quieter. Additionally we are capable of designing silent and more energy efficient boats. Instead of using sonar to detect things, we could use hydrophones to listen for things in the water. Ocean noise has a simple solution; we just need to be more conscious about it.