Beached whales get all the attention. When ocean noise gets any press, it usually involves a mass stranding of whales, written as a classic whodunit in which two experts disagree whether military sonar could be implicated.

In this antagonistic, two-sides-to-every-story media formulation, chronic ocean noise goes unmentioned. But scientists at Scripps have found that noise levels in the Pacific have roughly doubled every decade since the 1950s. Major ecological damage can be caused by the pedestrian, annual increase in noise levels that comes with the urbanization and marine habitat degradation we now take as given. It’s not the Bzzz of one whalewatching boat, or the POW! of one seismic survey – in some places, marine animals now live their lives amid a constant roar of background noise.

Chronic ocean noise – the ubiquitous din of shipping and fishing vessels, seismic surveys, pile driving: all of it – slowly but surely degrades the quality of habitat available to acoustically sensitive species. And we are finding now that that category of “acoustically sensitive species” includes lots of critters. Biologists at Woods Hole recently discovered that squid hear. Squid hear. Dr Steve Simpson found that larval fish hear their way to the coral reef on which they settle and live their lives. For the whales I study, chronic ocean noise reduces the quantity, not just quality of marine habitat available. My colleague, Dr Chris Clark (Cornell University) pioneered a masking metric that uses serious, solid science to generate an objective, repeatable metric to tell us what fraction of habitat whales lose from human-caused noise levels. In many cases, including the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale, it’s a big fraction.

If I told you that we could replace melting ice caps or disappearing coral reefs tomorrow, we’d find the political will to act. With ocean noise, we have such an opportunity.

This is the point where I generally lose my audience. One of two things happens. Some accept that this issue is worthy of proper scientific inquiry, but eyes glaze over at first mention of decibels, kilohertz, or sound being measured on a logarithmic scale. The other outcome is to equate this issue with animal welfare. As I write these words, I am acutely aware that, on the surface, this sounds like a naïve and faintly precious request to lower our voices because baby whales are sleeping. To make matters worse, most policy language trivializes the issue by asking whether marine habitats are impacted by “noise nuisance”. But ocean noise is not a nuisance. We experience noise nuisance at cocktail parties when the wine starts flowing and background noise starts to rise. But in the ocean, a whale is not straining to hear your co-worker’s thoughts on Vancouver housing prices, or the Royal Wedding. The acoustic cues that are being masked in the sea carry life-or-death consequences: here is a predator; there is food.

The flip side is that we have a tremendous opportunity to reclaim marine habitat, and it doesn’t require knowing what a decibel is. If I told you that there was a tool that could allow us to undo decades of clear-cut logging of old-growth coastal rainforest overnight, you’d listen. If I told you that we could replace melting ice caps or disappearing coral reefs tomorrow, we’d find the political will to act. With ocean noise, we have such an opportunity: unlike other pollutants, ocean noise disappears the instant the source is removed. Just like that. It is an almost-magical aspect of total recovery that makes this issue worth tackling. In this age of polar ice melts and depleted forests, we need to set a precedent to inspire us to tackle all the bigger and tougher environmental problems we face globally. We need a story with a happy ending.

The best part is it’s possible. It’s just that we scientists are just not doing a terrific job of infiltrating the policy and public arenas. Behind the scenes, a large body of cutting-edge science is being brought to bear on this issue. Scientists are calling for a 50% reduction in shipping noise in this decade. In that spirit, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) is encouraging member states to adopt ship-quieting technology. This development has huge potential, as 90% of global trade is transported by ship. We need to encourage IMO member states, our own countries, to act on that non-binding IMO pledge.

Of all the pressing environmental concerns we face, chronic ocean noise has a technological solution and offers one of the most tangible hopes for mitigation. Furthermore, mitigation need not be draconian and fleet-wide: rough calculations indicate that most shipping noise comes from the loudest 10% of ships, so some of the worst offenders could be dealt with by simply hammering out a bent propeller, or by asking ships to slow down when transiting important whale habitats. And for bigger and more lasting solutions, technology is available now to build quieter ships. We just need to create financial incentives for shipping companies to consider underwater noise whenever upgrading fleets anyway for reasons of fuel efficiency and emissions standards.

Shortly before I wrote this, I learned that Dr Jesse Ausubel, who headed the wildly successful and inspiring Census of Marine Life, has proposed a Quiet Ocean Experiment: a 4-hour period to quiet the ocean and measure what happens. I love this idea. Margaret Atwood once wrote that a scientist is someone who asks “What if?” questions. There is something poetic about scientists planning a global experiment to see what happens if we turn down our noise for a while. Lowering our oceans’ volume—even briefly— would be a tremendous start.

It’s also true that most ecological processes will take longer than 4 hours to respond so in addition to a short-term experiment, we need marine spatial planning that creates quiet times and places on big scales. In my own field research, I am finding that some waters off western Canada are several times louder than others; some are pin-drop quiet. This spatial variability lends itself to protected area-based management measures.

In this age of polar ice melts and depleted forests, we need to set a precedent to inspire us to tackle all the bigger and tougher environmental problems we face globally. We need a story with a happy ending.

When I present this work to my scientific colleagues, the response is maddeningly circular. Conventional wisdom says that we cannot protect acoustic attributes of the ocean because sound travels too well—any patch of water we want to keep quiet would be affected by unmanaged activities tens or hundreds of miles away. But the key to resolving such hurdles can be found in places like my home, British Columbia (BC). The tangle of islands, passages and fjords of the Great Bear Rainforest creates acoustic buffer zones. Offshore shipping noise does not seem to propagate well throughout this geographic maze, so the region is full of acoustic shadows, or quiet spaces. Some of these shadows are more important to whales than others. My vision is for quiet whale habitats to be identified, and set aside as Quiet Marine Protected Areas. Once we’ve initiated this proof-of-concept project in BC, where the whales, geography and policy arena set us up for success, we can then export to more challenging settings, including our cacophonous high seas. As a scientist, my ultimate goal is to quiet the oceans across the world—not for four hours, but forever.

—Dr. Rob Williams

Rob is a Marie Curie Research Fellow and Principal Investigator on the EU FP7-funded project CONCEAL (Chronic Ocean Noise: Cetacean Ecology and Acoustic habitat Loss) to investigate the effects of acoustic masking on whales.  He and Erin Ashe are co-founders of Oceans Initiative (www.oceansinitiative.org), a small non-profit dedicated to studying and protecting whales and dolphins. The work described here is the foundation of Oceans Initiative’s Quiet Ocean Campaign.