Ocean floor mapping is essential for identifying seismic activity and evaluating carbon storage capacity. To accomplish this task, scientists use large air guns that make loud noises down to the surface and back up again.
However, this process is very expensive and disturbs the natural habitat of marine mammals. Now, scientists have discovered a way to use whale sounds for the same purpose.
Mucan-mara Fin animals are 60 to 85-feet (20 to 25 mt) whose cries can be heard up to 600 miles (1,000 km) away. Researchers are now discovering that these sounds can be used to map the ocean floor down to 1.6 miles (2.5 kilometers).
“It’s very interesting that there’s another source of information,” he said Scientific America study co-author Václav Kuna, a seismologist at the Geophysics Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences.
Kuna explained that he noticed that the whale sound signals appeared only on seismometers of marine instruments, indicating that the signals did not come directly from the whales, but instead were echoes. kicking back from the ground.
Kuna then had to find the places of the whales to use the cry for images. He accomplished this by comparing the two sets of waves of the whales: one going to the bottom of the ocean and another kicking between the ocean floor and the surface.
This method is not immune. Kuna explained that whaling is limited in frequency and as a result underground images are not as clear as those produced by air guns. However, their added value in the field of marine mapping is uncertain.
“If we use the whale songs at least in support of other signal sources, they are free and are always there,” Kuna said. Scientific America. “It’s a win.” The next time you hear a whale song, remember it is more than a beautiful cry.
The study was published in the journal Science.