Thank you.
I love my job.
I'm a marine biologist, and I work up in the Arctic
alongside Inuit hunters and government biologists,
studying beluga, narwhals, killer whales and other marine mammals.
But what I really want to talk to you about today is sound.
Sound and how it's affecting marine mammals in the North.
Now, one of the wonderful things about my job
is that what I wear to work on a casual Friday
is probably a lot different than what you wear to work.
A typical day for me in a field is really anything but typical.
My drysuit is too big.
Anyone who works in the Arctic, in the water,
can tell you that having a drysuit that doesn't fit you
is a really, really bad thing.
Every time I move, I can feel a little bit of water running down my arm,
running down my legs and pooling at my feet.
I'm also standing about waist-deep in freezing-cold water.
I'm bracing myself up against one of my colleagues,
I've got pliers in one of my hands, I've got a glove in my mouth
- because if I put it down, it's going to drift away -
and I've got my other hand on the back of a beluga.
I'm working to attach the wires of a satellite transmitter to the animal,
as you can see in this photo behind me.
We're trying to figure out where these animals migrate to,
and what parts of their habitat are important for them
in order to protect their critical habitat for the future.
The whole thing from the capture to the release of the animal
takes about 20 minutes,
but I could certainly never tell you
that I have no idea of what is going on around me,
what the other people are saying, what they are doing,
other than what is right in front of me,
which is this beautiful, glossy, rubbery-feeling animal
that every now and then let's me know it's OK,
because I can feel this kind of body against me,
and I can also feel this kind of wet, fishy breath on the side of my face.
But I can certainly tell you that working around marine mammals,
university certainly doesn't prepare you for capturing and handling whales.
Now, these are photos of belugas.
You've probably seen photos before, they're pretty magnificent animals.
But I want to share with you is what they sound like,
what they sound like under water,
to give you an idea of how critical noise is to these animals.
(Beluga sounds)
It's pretty amazing if you haven't heard it before.
I get really close to these animals in their natural environment,
but what I'm really curious about is sound,
and how sound is affecting them in their natural behavior.
So here's the problem:
if I told you that this year
was the lowest extent of summer sea ice on record,
you probably wouldn't be surprised, it's all over the news.
But what might surprise you is how this is actually affecting
these animals and their habitat right now, even before the ice disappears,
which is actually another problem on its own.
As the sea ice changes, so does development.
We have industrialization in the Arctic, there is a lot of money at stake.
We have commercial shipping, we have oil and gas exploration.
We can all see what this can do to the marine environment,
but I think it's what we can't see
that is something that we need to think about right now.
The noise all of this is causing in our environment
might be doing more damage to the marine mammals
than we could imagine.
(Icebreaker sound)
What you've just heard was the sound of an icebreaker
breaking ice through the surface of the water; it's quite loud.
Imagine if you added to that noise created by seismic surveys,
noise created by drilling in the Arctic Ocean.
Now you have more noise created in the underwater environment,
in the Arctic, created by humans, than we've ever had before.
Now we're polluting our environment with more than just waste.
We're polluting our environment with noise.
Let me give you a sound example to put this into perspective.
The people at the back of this auditorium can for surely hear me speaking
even if they're not clueing into what I'm saying.
There is also probably people just outside the doors
that can hear me speaking as well if they have good hearing.
But almost for sure, there is no one out on the street, 100-200 meters away,
doors or no doors, that can hear me speaking.
Yes, sound does travel differently in air than it does in water,
but our human hearing, our undeveloped human hearing,
is nothing compared to that of a beluga or a narwhal.
These animals have the ability to communicate
over tens of kilometers under water.
Sound is also critical for their survival.
They use sound to communicate between each other,
they use sound to locate their food at depths,
and they also use sound to locate their breathing holes.
Recently, the behavior of these animals has begun to change.
We've started seeing these animals
avoiding commercial icebreakers at great distances.
Beluga, for example, have been seen avoiding ships
in distances of excess of 50 kilometers.
So we know that this is affecting them,
they want to keep a lot of space between these ships and themselves.
But what we don't know is how badly this is affecting them.
What we do know,
what our ongoing research has suggested,
is that all this noise is actually masking their ability
to communicate properly with each other.
This is a photo of an ice entrapment.
It's a pretty gory photo,
but I wanted to show you an example of what this looks like.
So on the left we have a breathing hole that is left in the ice,
and on the right
we have a bunch of belugas fighting for the space to breathe.
Now, ice entrapments in the Arctic are actually a natural occurrence.
They happen where winds pick up very quickly and water freezes over,
and these animals don't have enough time to escape to open water.
But recently, we've been seeing this happening in places
where it has never happened before,
in places that predictably cover over with ice every year.
In 2008, behavior of these animals changed,
and we saw over 1,000 whales parish in an ice entrapment.
Over 1,000 whales that were mainly mothers and calves.
Try to imagine what that looks like.
1,000 whales,
- we're talking 3 to 5 meters in length, maybe a little less for the babies,
and weighting up to the weight of a family van -
all trying to breathe out of one hole.
It's pretty disturbing when you think about it.
And mothers and calves,
It's obvious because the calves didn't have the lung capacity
to make it out to the open water,
which in this case was some 40 to 50 kilometers away,
and the mothers weren't willing to leave their babies behind.
In 2009, we had 100 animals die in West Greenland,
and in 2010, 50 to 100 whales.
It just doesn't make a lot of sense.
We have animals that predictably leave their summer grounds
- every year, end of September, beginning of October -
that chose not to leave an area that completely covers in ice.
Imagine the panic, imagine the chaos
that would cause an animal to return to an area
that wouldn't allow them to breathe.
What kind of noise were these animals hearing?
How loud must have it been?
What was different than before? Something had to have changed, right?
At the same time that these animals were beginning their migration
- again, end of September, beginning of October -
seismic activity was happening in North Baffin Bay.
Seismic activity has never occurred in North Baffin Bay this late in the year,
exactly at the time of the migration.
Scientists studying this problem suggest
that this seismic activity caused an interruption
in the traditional migration path of these animals
and caused them to return to their summer grounds;
again, an area that completely covers in ice.
Now, loud noise confuses us all, that's for sure.
Try to imagine that you're driving your car or riding you bike to work.
And at the same time that you hear an ambulance siren,
all the cars around you just lay on their horns.
Now, imagine trying to locate the ambulance noise
amongst all the rest of the noise.
Imagine trying to pick out that critical noise amongst all the rest
and figure out where you should go.
Another example.
Let's say that you're sitting in your office desk,
and there is a pile driver operating outside of one window,
and there is a truck moving forward and backward outside the other window,
and your colleague is nattering away really loudly on the phone.
Imagine trying to have a critical conversation of your own.
Or imagine trying to write a really important e-mail.
Pretty hard to focus, right?
Now, imagine if sound was
how you located your food or how you navigated.
A leading Danish researcher Mads Peter Heide-Jørgensen,
other colleagues and I believe
that sound might be causing new and substantial problems.
We think sound might be the reason
for these fall ice entrapments of narwhal in new areas.
Sound also travels over incredibly long distances under water.
If you've ever been scuba diving, you've probably experienced this before:
maybe you hear a propeller noise,
you look up thinking it's going to be right above you because it sounds so close
and it is actually way, way off in the distance.
Seismic ship-based surveys, which are used to locate
oil and gas deposits beneath the sea floor,
create an incredible amount of noise.
This noise which is created by explosions that generate sound waves
has been picked up
over 3,000 kilometers from the ship source.
Just try to imagine that - 3,000 kilometers!
We're talking farther than the distance from Vancouver to my hometown of Winnipeg.
Imagine being able to pick up one noise in that distance.
And perhaps, more importantly, the noise that is created by these surveys
is actually operating at a frequency
which overlaps that of narwhal communication.
Imagine the confusion that these animals must be undergoing
when a survey is happening.
How do you think we as humans may compare in this situation?
Now, what if seismic surveys are the reason for these entrapments?
What if ice breaking and year-round shipping in the Arctic
has the same effect?
What if noise of this magnitude has the ability
to mask communications between mother and calf,
mask the ability of these animals to find food at ocean depths,
or for these animals to find their breathing holes
which ultimately means their survival?
What if their winter grounds
where these animals do most of their yearly feeding
are inaccessible to them due to noise displacement?
What if their food moves as well? That's an entirely different problem.
As biologists continue to try and solve this mystery and study this problem,
I can tell you that these animals, beluga and narwhal,
have already taught me so much.
I know that we have to take an even closer look at all this noise,
at all the noise that we're creating in our environment,
and all the questions that it raises.
But we don't actually need to show an answer in order to get attention.
Mads Peter, other colleagues and I have a paper coming out
in the coming month on this exact topic.
And we're pretty excited because it's a question still,
"What if? What if?"
But it's a question that we hope will garner more attention.
Now, biologists and Inuit hunters agree
that noise pollution in the Arctic is a concern.
Seismic, ship-based sounds are a concern.
Inuit hunters got an injunction on Baffin Island
against seismic testing in Lancaster Sound in 2010,
an area that they're currently negotiating as a National Marine Conservation Area.
These animals,
part of an important subsistence harvest, were way too critical to them,
and they didn't need an absolute proof of negative impacts in order to stop it.
It's so easy for us
to focus on all these kind of big, in-your-face environmental issues.
We're bombarded with these images every day.
But I think it has never been more clear
that not all the damage that we're doing can be seen.
And I think that in order to solve this problem, to fix things going forward,
we're going to need to close our eyes and open our ears.
Thank you.
(Applause)