Fathoms by Rebecca Giggs

Fathoms by Rebecca Giggs

Author:Rebecca Giggs
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: NAT000000, NAT020000, NAT011000, NAT025000
Publisher: Scribe Publications Pty Ltd
Published: 2020-04-27T16:00:00+00:00


Being animals that variously inhabit the pitch-black and low-light seas, animals that sometimes hunt using the bio-sonic tings of echolocation, and which are thought to create, and maintain, their social attachments by vocalisation, whales exist in a delicate envelope of biological sound. So it surely surprises no one to learn that the clamour of marine traffic, seismic surveying, and underwater infrastructure creates channels of aversion for whales in the sea. As one Canadian scientist and Pew Fellow put it, ‘noise is reducing acoustic habitat for whales in the same way that clear-cut logging is reducing habitat for grizzly bears’. Yet the problem does not distress us the same way as, say, the deracination of a forest. These spaces are offshore and underwater, and as the harm is sonic and invisible, such blared-out regions are less routinely perceived by people. Like the deaths of the coral reefs — which would horrify if we could smell them (dying reefs would reek of rotting flesh, were they above water) — our own senses limit the suffering we can imagine. It proves necessary to project ourselves into the sensorium of whales, to sensitise ourselves to the extent of the damage done by artificial noise.

When Rachel Carson wrote the game-changing environmental book Silent Spring (1962), she envisioned a sinister season, absent the aubade of birdsong, because the birds had all died out from pesticide use. Conversely, noisiness has always represented a state of emergency underwater. Jacques Cousteau’s renowned 1956 documentary series, based on his memoir of underwater exploration, was titled Le Monde du Silence (The Silent World). But by the time of its release, the oceans were already drenched with artificial sound — with what has come to be called ‘anthrophony’ (anthropos: ‘human’). The seas have only continued to get louder.

After World War II, innovations in containerisation — the transportation of cargo in ‘roll-on, roll-off’ steel boxes of standard dimensions — facilitated a massive boom in the global shipping market. The accessibility of coastal nodes of transport, growing demand for energy drawn from offshore infrastructure, and increased freight entering expanding cities, have all called for larger ports and the intensifying traffic of heavier vessels (called ‘Ultra Large Container Vessels’ and ‘supertankers’). The largest of these ships are propelled by engines that can approach five storeys high, weighing 2,300 tons. The fuel these vessels run on is, essentially, the dregs of crude-oil refinement — it looks like asphalt, and is so thick that, when it is cold, a person can walk across it. In 2009, data released by maritime industry insiders showed that fifteen of the world’s biggest ships were emitting as much pollution as all the cars — 760 million cars — then in existence. As of 2016, 80 per cent of the world’s merchandise trade relied on shipping. Minerals, chemicals, lumber, fodder, and other bulk commodities are now shuttled worldwide, in immense quantities, over the sea, to be concentrated around global sites of development, manufacture, and agriculture. This migration is inordinately noise-generating.

Marine ‘roads’ bisect



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