Sonic Sea

March 15, 2000... the day of infamy,

as far as I'm concerned.

I woke up in the morning,

started having coffee, telling our team of people

that had just arrived that, you know, the chances

of seeing a beaked whale in a 10‐day period are slim.

My assistant, Dave,

came running inside and saying, "Ken!

Ken! There's a beaked whale right on the beach,

right in front of the house!"

And sure enough, there was a goose‐beaked whale swimming...

Moving his tail anyway,

as if it was trying to get up the beach.

In my mind, or maybe out loud,

I said,

"what are you doing here?"

They're supposed to be in deep water.

So I pushed it back out to sea.

Go, baby, go!

It swam out a little ways.

And it came back in.

We did this two or three times.

And then some neighbors came along and said,

"there's another one down at the point."

Covered it with, uh, sheets and kept splashing water on it,

while the rest kept trying to push the other whale out.

And then our neighbors came and said, "there's another whale

just another 200 yards up the beach from us."

As the day unfolded, we had people calling

from all over the Northern Bahamas saying,

"a whale strand here, whale strands there."

Something was causing all these whales

to wanna abandon the deep water

and get the hell outta there.

It was, uh, kinda devastating.

Animals that I had grown to know

over a 10‐year period were now dead.

They were trying to get away.

I was driven to find out why.

Everywhere on Earth,

we can hear the songs of life...

From the smallest insects

to the largest animals on the planet.

But most of us only hear half of this living symphony.

There's a completely different orchestra

playing beneath the surface of the sea.

One of the most memorable moments

I have in my life

was the first time I put on headphones

in the arctic.

It's gray and white.

It's almost sensory... Complete sensory deprivation.

I can't smell anything.

I can barely taste anything.

We found a little opening of water,

in which I dropped two underwater microphones.

Put on the headphones, I was completely amazed.

Bearded seals coming out of the ether,

as though they were from "the martian chronicles."

Beluga whales chirping and chattering and clicking.

And then the bowhead whales,

roaring low‐frequency moans.

And I was like, "Oh, my God!

This is fantastic!"

Chris Clark has been recording

the symphony of life on Earth

for more than 40 years.

He has built one of the largest collections

of animal sounds on the planet.

I listen to the world.

And to me, song is life.

It is the essence of who we are.

And it joins us all.

The problem is, in the ocean,

we are injecting enormous amounts of noise,

so much so that we are basically

acoustically bleaching the ocean.

All the singing voices of the planet

are lost in that cloud of noise.

This accumulation of sound

is changing the entire ecosystem underwater.

Some of the animals most directly affected

by this Sonic invasion

are the largest ever to have lived on Earth.

They're so large.

And they're so dramatic and magnificent.

They are highly conscious animals.

They have self‐awareness. They think.

They have intellectual capabilities that rival ours.

And their graciousness...

They're mammals. They're just like us.

They're a very specialized form

of life on this planet that,

basically, rules the ocean.

All whales can hear.

They have to for their survival.

The ocean is a completely different place

acoustically than in the air.

Sound can travel enormous distances

very, very fast,

whereas light doesn't travel very far at all.

And the whales have evolved to take advantage of that.

They can hear storms that are 1,000 miles away.

For humans, well, it's important for us to hear,

but not nearly as important

as it is for whales, dolphins

and many kinds of fish.

They're relying on being able

to sense their environment acoustically.

Whether it's finding their buddies,

knowing where food is, knowing where the shoreline is.

Well, they certainly have eyes.

And they use their eyes.

But they're far more reliant

on their hearing to live.

Think about it... even in the clearest ocean water,

visibility is nothing close to what you have on the land.

And 100 feet is considered to be really good.

But you can look up at the stars

and see light that has been transmitted

over millions of miles on the land.

You can look and see mountains in the distance, miles away.

Just as air is a brilliant medium for light,

water is a brilliant medium for sound.

To give you an example,

in the early 1990s,

a group of scientists

put a noise-making device, uh,

down in the Southern Indian ocean.

They wanted to see just how far sound would travel.

The sound that they produced carried into the Atlantic ocean,

into the Pacific ocean.

It carried as far

as those researchers were listening.

Their furthest hydrophone, or underwater microphone,

was positioned off of Washington state,

which means that the sound traveled some 17,000 kilometers

and was still audible.

And the whales see the ocean through sound.

So their mind's eye is their mind's ear.

So I'm in this tent with an Inupiat whaling captain.

And I want the ears for science.

I wanna get the ear bones of the whale

so that I can give 'em to a colleague,

who is a scientist, to understand,

how do they hear?

What... what is so different about these animals?

And this Inupiat whaling captain just looked at me.

And very deliberately, he said,

"do you know that the ears are the entrance

to the soul of the whale?"

And now, I even get emotional remembering that statement.

The ears of this animal

are the entrance to its self‐consciousness,

to its life, to its history, to its future.

The Bahamas stranding, well,

we had specimens that had died within hours.

And I knew

that collecting a fresh specimen

and freezing it as soon as possible

would provide the best evidence

that would show what sort of damage

was going on internally.

I transported two beaked whale heads

and a dolphin from Bahamas

and got 'em over to a commercial airplane

going to Boston.

Trucked the specimens right over to the cat scans

at Harvard medical school and,

by 2 A. M.,

had seen the evidence of sub-arachnoid hemorrhage

around the brain and blood around the ears.

Uh, they were definitely, uh, impacted.

I knew that it was a human‐caused stranding.

I was very concerned that, uh, we learn

what specifically are we doing that

is causing these mortalities,

and not do this again.

Humans have been changing the sound of the oceans

since we first started exploring the seas.

But our ocean presence has exploded

over the last 5 decades.

The world that these long‐lived creatures

have experienced is changed on a geologic scale.

We are seeing just a different planet.

Some whales, they live to be 150 to 200 years old.

When those whales were teenagers,

the world was quiet. Okay?

So if I disrupt your ability to hunt,

or if I disrupt the ability of a female

to make a choice between the best singers

because she can only hear the ones

that are closest to her,

what's the impact of that?

Getting lost in the ocean

must be terrifying to a young whale.

Can't find its mother. Can't find its family.

A lost whale, in that sense,

would be, likely, a dead whale.

Uh, I've known about whale song for a long time.