The sources of human-produced noise are endless, says Duarte.Įven ostensibly climate-friendly activities, such as constructing offshore wind farms, can substantially increase local sound levels (though the sound of the turbines themselves tends to attenuate within a few hundred meters). One of the paper’s co-authors, multimedia artist Jana Winderen, contributed an audio track of the ocean soundscape, shifting from the sounds of a healthy ocean to the human-caused cacophony that defines much of the marine soundscape today.ĭynamite fishing, designed to stun or kill reef fish for easy collection, remains a major source of blasting noise in Southeast Asia and coastal Africa, the report notes, while in the North Sea, “the controlled detonation of bombs dropped on the seafloor during World War II continues, more than 70 years later, to be a major source of disruptive and destructive sound.” Underwater oil and gas drilling is an obvious source of noise, but so too are the seismic surveys used to locate new fields, which utilize a kind of sonic cannon to pound the sea floor with enough force to vibrate three miles deep. When talking about soundscapes, print articles can only do so much to illustrate the issue. “This makes the ocean soundscape one of the most important, and perhaps under-appreciated, aspects of the marine environment,” the report notes. Sound, the authors noted, is the sensory cue that travels farthest through the ocean and is used by marine animals, from invertebrates to great whales, to interpret and explore the marine environment around them. Duarte, distinguished professor at Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah University of Science and Technology ( KAUST).ĭuarte’s team of global researchers combed through more than 10,000 scientific papers on the subject of marine sound and its impact on wildlife and found overwhelming evidence that anthropogenic, or human-caused, noise negatively impacted marine fauna and their ecosystems, disrupting their behavior, physiology, reproduction and, in extreme cases, causing mortality. “We are hoping that this report will not only reveal elements of how humans impact the ocean through sound pollution, but that it will also bring the topic to the attention of policymakers who will be able to act based upon the very real solutions that we have at our disposal,” says lead author Carlos M. Now, a new paper published in the journal Science titled “Soundscape of the Anthropocene Ocean” lays out the repercussions, demonstrating that noise pollution can be just as harmful to the ocean environment as other kinds of pollution.īut unlike plastic pollution or fertilizer runoff, remedies are easy to find and the damage can be reversed. Until recently, underwater sound pollution had not attracted the same attention as its terrestrial equivalent. YakYak is another good third-party desktop client for Hangouts.Over the past couple of hundred years, humans have progressively altered the ocean soundtrack with the introduction of shipping, industrial fishing, coastal construction, oil drilling, seismic surveys, warfare, sea-bed mining and sonar-based navigation. If you don't like this, try using an alternative messenger client like Franz, which lets you access Hangouts and other web services all from one window. You'll need to use the Hangouts Chrome extension if you don't want to visit the main webpage. The only potential issue with Hangouts is that it doesn't offer an official desktop app. Overall, if you have lots of friends who aren't Apple users, this is a great choice for your primary messenger. These are almost always free inside the US and Canada, but vary in other countries. Using Hangouts, you can even place calls to regular mobile or landline phones. You can add groups of up 10 people, and your Google contacts are automatically added and organized. Search for someone using their email address or phone number, and you can start chatting with them via text, an audio call, or a video chat. A popular alternative to Skype, Hangouts can do pretty much everything Skype lets you do.
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