Southern Ocean soundscape
Video transcript
Jacques Cousteau called the underwater world 'the silent world' and he couldn't have been more wrong about that.
There's a tremendous amount of information that we can learn about the Southern Ocean simply by listening to it.
[Killer whale clicks]
I study underwater sound and particularly the sounds of whales and other marine mammals in the Antarctic.
Blue and fin whales in particular are endangered species. They are very rarely encountered in the Southern Ocean. But when we listen for them, we can hear them over very large distances, so listening for them is an incredibly efficient way to study them.
[Blue whale song]
TEXT BOX: Sonobuoys are deployed from ships to hear and track whales up to 1000 km away.
TEXT BOX: Moorings on the sea floor record ocean sounds continuously for one year.
[Whale and seal calls]
TEXT BOX: These yearly sound recordings help scientists learn more about marine mammal behaviour.
A lot of the questions that we're trying to answer; are how many whales are there, where are they, when do we see them? These are really basic fundamental questions that you need to be able to answer if you want to have any chance of conserving and managing populations of whales effectively.
