That’s deep!
Seven miles deep…
The project, which was funded by the NOAA’s Office of Ocean Exploration and Research, was designed to establish a baseline for ambient noise in the deepest part of the Pacific Ocean.
Human-created noise has increased steadily in recent decades and getting these first recordings allows scientists in the future to determine if the noise levels are growing and how this might affect marine animals that use sound to communicate, navigate and feed, such as whales, dolphins and fish.
Challenger Deep is a valley inside the Mariana trench, seven miles below the surface of the ocean. If Mount Everest was placed inside Challenger Deep, the mountain’s peak would still be a mile underwater.
That’s deep…
I am reminded of the work of esteemed American marine biologist, Roger Payne, [producer of the famed Songs of the Humpback Whale] who found in the 1960’s that the great whales of the world ‘enjoyed’ a global communication network for tens of thousand of years, gaining the benefit of a “deep sound channel in the ocean”, a combination of thermal layers and currents that allowed these whales to transmit their ‘songs’ at a wavelength of 20hz over incredible distances to communicate with whales in other oceans.
Dr. Payne’s work was [and remains] the inspiration for many of the activities of the original Whalesong Foundation [1990] and WhaleSongServices
Challenger Deep
