Global communications fiber could be used in “Digital Acoustical Sensing

Day 4 of the OCEANOISE conference focused on the themes of “Soundscapes,” “Explosives,” and “Sonar.” Much of the day spend on Soundscapes, with the first Session, and all of the “5-minute talks” and poster sessions on Soundscapes. But before I dive into Soundscapes, the other two sessions warrant some comments.

Most folks in the US are unaware of the “Unexploded Ordnance” (UXO) problem found off the coasts of Western Europe.  There are thousands of bombs from 2kg. to 200kg. that were dropped in the water during WWII. They were dropped because planes carrying bombs that were not used on targets could not land with them, for fear that if the landing failed, the bombs would damage or destroy the airfield. So when returning with unused bombs, pilots would just drop them in the sea. But now, as human enterprises move offshore, all of these bombs pose a hazard. This is particularly exacerbated with the development of offshore windfarms. And of course just blowing them all up just defers the damage left over from the war – with heavy consequences on marine life.

A joint project by Loughborough University, the UK National Physics Lab, and Arhaus University has developed a “deflagration” protocol whereby a hole is drilled into the bombs, and the contents are set on fire, significantly stretching out the time that the explosive energy of the content is released. This can decrease the noise level by 20dB (1/100th of the noise) thereby significantly decreasing the acoustical damage to sea animals and their habitat.

And of course most of us would not be here without the sonar issue that came up on everyone’s screens 25 years ago, when a mass-stranding occurred while there were public hearings in the US about “Navy sonar.”

The term “Soundscape” was first introduced back in 1977 by Canadian composer R.Murray Schafer with his seminal book “The Soundscape: Our sonic environment and the tuning of the world.” Schafer couches his argument in the toxicity of chaotic sound environments from a human perceptual standpoint. But the term has since become useful in evaluating other bioacoustic settings – particularly in the sea, where it is much easier to identify things by hearing them than seeing them. The challenge is to decipher what all the sounds mean.

The inquiries were focused on instrumentation, metrics, and interpretation. Marine life density can express itself through biological sound complexity, and how industrial noise can compromise it. Coral reef recordings are being used to encourage reef animals to recruit into compromised reef areas, and elephant seals fitted with sound recorders are diving down and bringing back soundscape recordings from 1000 meters deep.

Another unfolding soundscape instrument technology is “Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS),” which uses the distortions wrought on fiber-optic signals from ocean sounds that impinge on them. Unlike hydrophones, which pick up sounds to a single point, fiber-optic cables can pick up sounds along the entire length. Ths means that entire ocean basin soundscapes can be accessed and modeled – within the 5kHz-and-below bandwidth of the DAS technology.

This will go far in understanding the dynamics of the soundscapes throughout the sea.

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Bow-wave riding Dolphin

It was on the third day of the OCEANOISE conference that things started to gel. The themes and loose ends of the previous days began convening on the session topics – which were “Riverine and Coastal,” “Management and Policy,” and “Seismic.” Like water, all of the so many different ideas and flavors began flowing together.

All of the relevant terms – “exposure,” “static and dynamic thresholds,” “level of onset of biological effects” (LOBE), and the distinctions between quantity and quality of noise impositions – are all becoming the common vocabulary we all speak when talking about ocean noise. This included people in conservation, regulation, research, academics, and industry.

The utility of this is clear; having a common vocabulary facilitates action between all stakeholders. When those making the noise and those concerned about the noise are speaking in common terms, the regulatory thresholds become less ambiguous.

What has been problematic about the “simple threshold” regulatory regime is that those thresholds don’t apply universally to all animals. The classic example is when dolphins were found surfing the bow-waves of seismic survey vessels – clearly being “overexposed” to human-generated noise. This highlighted the need for a more nuanced set of guidelines that Southall et al 2007 derived, identifying marine mammals into four sets of frequency-defined hearing regimes. (This was further nuanced and included in subsequent revisions of the Marine Mammal Protection Act.)

On Wednesday, Erica Staaterman with the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) introduced a four-tiered system of evaluating various seismic survey technologies based on  criteria that include amplitude, impulsivity, and another metric that includes net energy exposure over 60 seconds. This accommodates what we all know about seismic survey technologies and its various impacts on marine fauna. It also recognizes what used to be generically called “seismic survey blasting” by the conservation community, into gradations of ‘seismic signals’ that accommodate the impacts on marine life in consideration of the needs of industry, suggesting monitoring guidelines that reflect conservation concerns.

This has been facilitated by all ocean noise stakeholders hewing toward a commonly understood vocabulary (and it has only taken 30 years!)

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Zooplankton Mandala

Day two of the OCEANOISE-2026 conference was every bit as rich as Day 1. The “sessions” were “Polar,” “Sensitivity and Pathology,” and “Behavior.”

“Polar” largely examined the complex assumptions we make about things like masking, and the limits of noise exposures for critters living in a habitat that can be extremely noisy on account of bubbles releasing from horizons of seasonal melting ice; ice plates ripping and crashing into each other over miles of interface, and glaciers collapsing into the sea – and what this all means in the arctic as shipping lanes replace the disappearing polar ice as it subsumes to climate change.

The other two sessions examined how marine fauna reacts and responds to human-generated noise – which is different than the natural cacophony of a healthy ocean. There was an interesting, if mildly terrifying presentation on how various taxa of zooplankton respond to the noise of windfarms. These critters are the base of the trophic pyramid – so their relative densities have bearing on all taxa feeding above them.

It turns out that windfarm noise is harmful to some species, but advantageous to others, disrupting the natural density balance that has been established over the last few billion years. What this means as the zooplankton ‘travel up the food chain’ can only be speculated.

We are seeing a variation of this disruption theme in the natural history of the gray whales. These animals feed on amphipods and other benthic invertebrates in the arctic. These benthic invertebrates feed on the “snow” of phytoplankton that falls down from the polar ice cover above. As the polar ice retracts, the phytoplankton don’t have a place to grow, pulling the plug on this important food chain. This is resulting in the crashing of the gray whale population.

What other trophic disruptions await as the noise of human enterprise expands further and deeper into the ocean?

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Monday, May 25 was my first day at the OceanNoise conference in Vilanova i la Gertru – a small,  picturesque town down the coast from Barcelona, Spain. Every three years this conference, organized by Michel Andre with the University of Catalonia, and his colleagues, brings together many of us who are involved in the various research and strategies around the acoustical intersection of human enterprise and marine bioacoustics. This conference has also been a chance for me to catch up with colleagues in the ocean noise field, some of whom I have known for over 20 years.

One of the virtues of OCEANOISE is that while it includes many academics, it also includes people in ocean policy, marine conservation, and ocean industries. So a lot of work gets done – not just through the presentations, key notes, and poster sessions, but also through the long lunches and social events that orbit around the many discussions stimulated by the programming.

Monday’s presentation sessions included “Renewable Energy” (meaning wind), “Emerging Topics,” and “Mapping and Modeling.” The offshore wind power session was heavy on pile driving noise attenuation technologies, and the biological and physiological effects of pile driving noise and vibration on marine fauna. The sessions are a set of topical 10 minute presentations followed by discussion driven by a panel of the presenters through questions from attendees and participants. These are pretty rich, given the density of experience in the room.

The “Emerging Topics” included topics that are truly emerging –  like the potential acoustical impacts of deep-sea mining, but also topics that have been problematic forever, but are emerging as conservation scientists are coming to understand the complexity of the damage our ocean enterprises are inflicting. These include deeper assessments of shipping noise and seismic surveys – knowing what we know now.

This discussion migrated into the interesting realm of “metrics” – how our actions are measured and expressed in terms that are substantiated by science, as well as understood by people operating in the field and those who are regulating those operations.

This comes up occasionally; regulators want “go/no-go” decisions that trigger regulatory thresholds. But nature has none of these dichotomous boundaries. A simple semantic example in the ocean noise field is the distinction between “continuous” and “impulsive noise. These distinctions usher in their own sets of regulatory guidelines. So under these regulatory thresholds, underwater processing noise is considered “continuous,” and seismic airgun surveys are considered “impulsive.” But if there is a seismic survey that bangs away every ten seconds for six months, is there a part of that which might be considered “continuous?”

Given that noise exposure regulations kick in at sound exposure levels of 160dB (re: 1uPa) for impulsive noise, and 120dB for continuous noise, the time window that distinguishes the difference would have a pretty profound impact on regulatory thresholds.

This example may be academic, as even establishing the 120dB threshold was somewhat arbitrary – based on easily recognized behavioral disruptions in captive marine mammals exposed to noise at that level. (It was later found that at least with bowhead whales, behavioral disruptions were recognizable at 94dB exposure levels.) (Blackwell 2015).

What was woven through the “Emerging Topics” session was that as researchers have collected more data over the years, recognizing subtleties and nuance, and bringing up those annoying “shades of gray” in animals response, adaptations, and stress impacts that regulators hate.

What we do know is that mechanized human engagement in the ocean is disruptive to marine life. Current regulations hopefully provide “tolerability” guidelines for our various engagements for life in the sea. But it seems that given all of the recent collection of nuanced data, and the expanded analysis tools becoming available, the regulatory environment may be ripe for an update.

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DOI Secretary Doug Burgum (center) surrounded by a halo of oil execs.
(Looking out for your best interests, no doubt.)

When Barrack Obama was elected in 2008, and seated in 2009, he appointed Ken Salazar as Secretary of the Department of Interior (DOI). This brought an end to eight years of the DOI being run at the convenience of the extraction industries. With a new sheriff in town, Salazar didn’t waste any time letting us, the public, know that the Department of Interior was back in our hands.

Before the regular five-year review of the offshore leasing plan was issued, Secretary Salazar held large public hearings on all four coasts of America to listen to how citizens wanted the Federal stewardship of our ocean assets to be managed. The citizens in these meetings included commercial fishers, crabbers, and lobstermen; it included recreational users – boaters, sailors, fishers, surfers, and divers. It included the many informed ocean conservation organizations such as OCR. It included California First Nations delegates. It also included representatives from the fossil fuel industry.

I attended in San Francisco, and by-and-large was encouraged by the public’s view of our relationships with the ocean. This was after eight years of our Outer Continental Shelf being treated like a private asset of the industrial extraction industries.

But when the Deepwater Horizon blowout disaster happened on April 20 of 2010, it took Ken Salazar just shy of a month to address the central problem; Minerals Management Service (MMS), headquartered in Denver Colorado, was way too closely associated with the fossil fuel administrative offices in town. MMS became a “one stop shop” for the administration of leases, the regulation of safety and engineering standards, and the payment of extraction royalties to the American people. This was lubricated by cocaine-dusted panty-parties with MMS and Industry, assuring compromised outcomes for us, the taxpayers. (Salazar had been Colorado’s AG, and then Senator before he became Secretary of the Interior, so he likely had a nose for this mess already).

By May 19, 2010 MMS offshore management had been broken up into three agencies; Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) – handling the leasing and management of our offshore assets, Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE) – as the name implies, and Office of Natural Resources Revenue (ONRR), responsible for the collection and distribution of royalties and revenues from energy and minerals extraction. The industry/governance party was broken up – much to the grousing of both parties (who committed to return to their old party ways as soon as they could).

So it is no surprise that last week the Administration proposed consolidating the agencies again into the “Ocean Minerals Management” agency to the muffled fanfare of Industry (nothing to see here…).

Just another thing we’ll need to fix once we get our hands back on the tiller again. But now we have a map…

Photo: DOI Secretary Doug Burgum (center) with (left, top to bottom) Chris Wright, President Trump’s Department of Energy nominee, and oil tycoon Harold Hamm, along with (right top to bottom) Bakken shale oil producer Danny Brown, and Todd Slawson, chair of the North Dakota Petroleum Council.

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While taking this Earth Day to punctuate our appreciation for the our entire planet may seem a stingy expression of gratitude for Mother Earth that sustains all life, it is a great day to take a pause and honor those people who have dedicated their lives to honor Her – every day. In this we had a great opportunity on Monday, at the Goldman Environmental Prize. This prize culminates in annual event – which has been celebrating it for the last 37 years. Each year the Goldman Family recognizes six environmental activists – one from each continent, who have gone to extraordinary lengths to organize their communities, and turned the tides on what had seemed like inevitable resource-extraction-caused environmental destruction.

Saving rivers, rainforests, lakes, mountains, and the ocean from mining, clearcutting, polluting factories, industrial farming, and so many other misguided attempts to grind up our planet and turn it into money. These environmental heroes, in addition to often facing “purchased” governmental indifference, often also risk facing corporate violence.

This year was a Goldman “first:” It was the first ceremony in 37 years that all of the recipients were women(!).

Sarah Finch from England, organized her community toward prevailing in a Supreme Court ruling that requires fossil fuel companies to account for all of their environmental damages – not just the operational damages. The resulting “Finch Ruling” states that “authorities must consider the downstream impacts that fossil fuels will have on the global climate before granting permission to extract them.”

Borim Kim from Korea, organized “기후를 위한 청년” (Youth for Climate) in which the Constitutional Court “found the government’s climate policy to be in violation of the constitutional rights of future generations, mandating the creation of legally binding emissions reduction targets…”

Yuvelis Morales Blanco mobilized her community in Puerto Wilches, Colombia, preventing the introduction of fracking in the nation. Iroro Tanshi from Nigeria set up a citizen and community infrastructure to address, prevent, and abate human-induced wildfires that have been exacerbated by climate change.

(Do you perceive a fossil-fueled theme here?)

Iroro Tanshi’s work compelled Rio Tinto – the world’s second largest mining company (ironic name, BTW), to clean up the toxic wastes they left behind when they abandoned their operations in Papua New Guinea 35 years ago.

All of these women’s work teared me up. People showing their deep love for our planet, and dedicating their lives to making it better – always shining light into the shadow of those who have focused their businesses into making it worse.

But I was most moved to tears by the work of Yup’ik leader Alannah Acaq Hurley, of Bristol Bay, Alaska, who, acting on behalf of the 15 area tribes, halted the development of the Pebble Mine. Seeking copper and gold, this proposed mine would be the largest open-pit mine on the planet.

(For those not familiar with mining; desired metals are not extracted as nuggets out of the earth; rather they come up as ore, which is then drenched in acids to extract the desired metals. The biproduct of this are acidic “mine tailings” which end up in “tailing ponds” which will sooner or later find their way into flowing water – destroying over time all of the relationships that these tribes have had with life on the land and in the sea since the beginning of time. Their salmon relatives would be the first to go, cascading into Bristol Bay becoming industrial waste-waters.)

All for what?

(Pebble Mine permits are still “live” so she is seeking signatures in support of her work letting regulators and administrators know how many people object to the mine, and support what they are doing: https://www.utbb.org/public-comment )

So this Earth Day, let us honor those who have dedicated their lives to our beautiful planet!

The post Earth Day 2026 Part 2 appeared first on Ocean Noise.

Earth Day tends to arrive with a lot of numbers.

Tons of carbon. Degrees of warming. Barrels spilled, acres lost, species counted down.

It rarely arrives with a number for what is still here.

For most of modern economic history, the ocean has been valued by what can be taken from it: fish landed, oil extracted, minerals surveyed. The living systems that produce those things, and the much larger web of processes that sustain the planet, have been treated as background. Free. Assumed.

Silent, when in fact they are anything but.

On Monday, Michael marked the sixteenth anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon blowout with a reflection on what oil costs: in dead zones, in dismantled oversight, in blood.

Today, I want to write about what the ocean is worth.

What the Ledger Leaves Out

In 1997, an ecologist named Robert Costanza did something economists had largely avoided: he tried to put a number on nature.

Not on timber or fish or oceanfront real estate, but on the work ecosystems perform simply by existing. Wetlands absorbing storm surge. Forests filtering drinking water. Reefs sheltering the fisheries that feed a billion people. Oceans cycling carbon, producing oxygen, moderating the climate at a scale no human technology approaches.

Costanza and his colleagues calculated, service by service, what it would cost to replicate these functions artificially, or to live without them. Updated in 2014, the estimate reached $125 trillion per year, more than the entire global economy.

For comparison, the global oil and gas industry generates four to five trillion dollars annually.

A fraction of what ecosystems actually produce, and what our economies have organized themselves around.

The numbers are contested. Some economists argue the figure is far too low. Others, including many conservationists, argue that pricing nature is a category error: that assigning a dollar value concedes the terms of a market that was never built to defend it.

Both critiques hold.

A coral reef is not worth its per-hectare dollar figure the way a warehouse is worth its square footage. The number is a translation, not a truth.

But translation has a way of shaping what is seen, and what we are able to perceive.

What appears on the ledger is accounted for.
What remains outside of it is easier to overlook.

What a Whale Is Worth

The ledger has always had blind spots for species whose influence exceeds what their numbers suggest.

Ecologists call them keystone species, organisms whose influence on an ecosystem is disproportionate to their numbers. Remove them, and the system around them begins to shift. Sometimes slowly. Sometimes all at once.

Sea otters keep kelp forests intact by preying on urchins. Sharks shape where and how their prey move, keeping seagrass meadows and coral reefs from being overgrazed. Whales move nutrients across ocean basins, linking surface and depth in ways we are still beginning to understand.

In the Gulf of Mexico, fewer than sixty Rice’s whales remain.

They are the most endangered baleen whale species on Earth, a species only formally recognized in 2021, already on the edge of disappearing. Their range overlaps almost entirely with active and proposed oil and gas leases.

A Rice’s whale does not appear on a balance sheet.

It produces no extractable product.

Within the system it inhabits, it is something else entirely.

What would be lost with it is not contained to the animal itself, but to the relationships it is part of, many of which are only partially visible to us, and only partially heard.

The full accounting tends to arrive later.

– Daniela Huson

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April 20, 2026 is the 16th anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon blow-out disaster. In the post-mortem of how it happened, it was found that the “engineer” overseeing the operation decided to ignore the clear signals of pipe pressure irregularities for the sake of expediency. It was through this deliberate oversight that over 40 million barrels of crude oil and 2 million gallons of Corexit dispersant were set loose into the sea, causing a benthic dead zone the size of Oklahoma beneath the waves (out of sight, out of mind…).

 Because the disaster could be systematically pinned to lax regulation and oversight by the Department of the Interior’s Minerals Management Department (MMS), the Agency was broken up into three distinct agencies. This included Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE), and the Office of Natural Resources Revenue (ONRR). This thwarted the Fossil Fuel Industry from treating MMS as a “One Stop Shop” for all of their regulatory, engineering safety, and royalty “needs.”

Of course the current Administration, having knocked the knees out from under each of these agencies, the Department of the Interior wants to consolidate them again into the “Marine Minerals Administration.”

 So now we have this other “unanticipated” energy emergency with dogfights over the control of the Straits of Hormuz. There is a provision in the Endangered Species Act (ESA) providing for regulatory flexibility on account of “National Security Concerns.” This pulls together the Secretaries of the Interior, Army, and Agriculture, along with Administrators of NOAA and Environmental Protection Agency – into a ‘council’ termed the “God Squad” to make the determination that due to a “National Security Emergency,” the Endangered Species Act can be ignored. And in this case, specifically ignored by the fossil fuel industry.

 This seems to have whetted the appetites of some in the Industry, who had previously been a bit reluctant to commit to developing new oil leases which would not be productive for another five to ten years, and would also foul up their calculated shell game..

 My inner cynic believes that all of these regulatory and policy aberrations are being driven by the current Administration’s strategy of governance through “emergency proclamations” (and subsequent litigations). Thoughtful.

 If you look at all of the global conflicts over the last century, they have been largely driven by fossil fuel. The first shots in WWI were in the bombing of the Berlin to Baghdad Railroad. The transformation of Persia into Iran tracks the Western interests in the region’s  oil. Even the Vietnam war was spawned by the understanding that the Gulf of Tonkin had shallow, easily accessible oil. (Once it was found to be crappy quality, the US came up with an excuse to depart.) The sabotage of the Nordstream II pipeline was a big driver in western oil’s need thwart Russia’s control of Ukraine. Conflicts in the Niger Delta, and the burning of the Kuwait oilfields at end of the “Desert Storm” were all expressions of the value of fossil fuel to this thing we call “The Global Economy.”

 This is really punctuated by the fact that most of the Western global economies that are anchored to the “G7” are not pinned to the US Dollar, rather they are pinned to the “Petrodollar” and fertilized with, and bathed in millions of gallons of human blood.

 So this geopolitical acknowledgment of the 16th anniversary of the Deepwater Thunderhorse Blowout” may be a bit “out of my lane” as a marine bioacoustician. But I can say that the Sun shines on the Strait of Hormuz; it does not flow through it.

 And solar energy is really quiet.

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Earth from Artemis II

While taking this Earth Day to punctuate our appreciation for the our entire planet may seem a stingy expression of gratitude for Mother Earth that sustains all life, it is a great day to take a pause and honor those people who have dedicated their lives to honor Her – every day. In this we had a great opportunity on Monday, at the Goldman Environmental Prize. This prize culminates in annual event – which has been celebrating it for the last 37 years. Each year the Goldman Family recognizes six environmental activists – one from each continent, who have gone to extraordinary lengths to organize their communities, and turned the tides on what had seemed like inevitable resource-extraction-caused environmental destruction.

Saving rivers, rain forests, lakes, mountains, and the ocean from mining, clear-cutting, polluting factories, industrial farming, and so many other misguided attempts to grind up our planet and turn it into money. These environmental heroes, in addition to often facing “purchased” governmental indifference, often also risk facing corporate violence.

This year was a Goldman “first:” It was the first ceremony in 37 years that all of the recipients were women(!).

Sarah Finch from England, organized her community toward prevailing in a Supreme Court ruling that requires fossil fuel companies to account for all of their environmental damages – not just the operational damages. The resulting “Finch Ruling” states that “authorities must consider the downstream impacts that fossil fuels will have on the global climate before granting permission to extract them.”

Borim Kim from Korea, organized “기후를 위한 청년” (Youth for Climate) in which the Constitutional Court “found the government’s climate policy to be in violation of the constitutional rights of future generations, mandating the creation of legally binding emissions reduction targets…”

Yuvelis Morales Blanco mobilized her community in Puerto Wilches, Colombia, preventing the introduction of fracking in the nation. Iroro Tanshi from Nigeria set up a citizen and community infrastructure to address, prevent, and abate human-induced wildfires that have been exacerbated by climate change.

(Do you perceive a fossil-fueled theme here?)

Iroro Tanshi’s work compelled Rio Tinto – the world’s second largest mining company (ironic name, BTW), to clean up the toxic wastes they left behind when they abandoned their operations in Papua New Guinea 35 years ago.

All of these women’s work teared me up. People showing their deep love for our planet, and dedicaing their lives to making it better – always shining light into the shadow of those who have focused their businesses into making it worse.

But I was most moved to tears by the work of Yup’ik leader Alannah Acaq Hurley, of Bristol Bay, Alaska, who, acting on behalf of the 15 area tribes, halted the development of the Pebble Mine. Seeking copper and gold, this proposed mine would be the largest open-pit mine on the planet.

(For those not familiar with mining; desired metals are not extracted as nuggets out of the earth; rather they come up as ore, which is then drenched in acids to extract the desired metals. The biproduct of this are acidic “mine tailings” which end up in “tailing ponds” which will sooner or later find their way into flowing water – destroying over time all of the relationships that these tribes have had with life on the land and in the sea since the beginning of time. Their salmon relatives would be the first to go, cascading into Bristol Bay becoming industrial waste-waters.)

All for what?

(Pebble Mine permits are still “live” so she is seeking signatures in support of her work letting regulators and administrators know how many people object to the mine, and support what they are doing:

https://www.utbb.org/public-comment )

So this Earth Day, let us honor those who have dedicated their lives to our beautiful planet.

The post Earth Day 2026 appeared first on Ocean Noise.