Climate change will significantly alter how sound travels underwater, potentially affecting natural soundscapes as well as accentuating human-generated noise, according to a new global study that identified future ocean “acoustic hotspots.”
Climate change will significantly alter how sound travels underwater, potentially affecting natural soundscapes as well as accentuating human-generated noise, according to a new global study that identified future ocean “acoustic hotspots.” These changes to ocean soundscapes could impact essential activities of marine life.
In warmer water, sound waves propagate faster and last longer before dying away.
“We calculated the effects of temperature, depth and salinity based on public data to model the soundscape of the future,” said Alice Affatati, an bioacoustics researcher at the Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador in St. John’s, Canada, and lead author of the new study, published today in Earth’s Future, AGU’s journal for interdisciplinary research on the past, present and future of our planet and its inhabitants. It is the first global-scale estimate of ocean sound speed linked to future climate.
Two hotspots, in the Greenland Sea and a patch of the northwestern Atlantic Ocean east of Newfoundland, can expect the most change at 50 and 500 meter depths, the new study projected. The average speed of sound is likely to increase by more than 1.5%, or approximately 25 meters per second (55 miles per hour) in these waters from the surface to depths of 500 meters (1,640 feet), by the end of the century, given continued high greenhouse gas emissions (RCP8.5).
Read more at: American Geophysical Union
Warmer oceans mean sound will travel faster, impacting marine animals who depend on sounds to find each other and eat. The largest effect on the underwater speed of sound can be expected east of Greenland and off Newfoundland in the Atlantic, according to a new study in the AGU journal Earth’s Future. (Photo Credit: NOAA)
