People Make Too Much Ocean Noise
And It’s Harming Puget Sound Orcas
Our oceans are getting steadily louder, and that’s undermining the recovery of endangered whales, including Puget Sound orcas. But we keep ignoring the increasing underwater noise we’re creating, and instead of addressing the problem, we’re planning to make the disorienting cacophony even worse.
The latest example is the planned dredging and expansion of Seattle Harbor to bring in larger, louder container ships. The Trump administration rubber-stamped an approval of the massive project in Southern Resident killer whale critical habitat without analyzing the harm it would do to the critically endangered whales — who’ll be sonically assaulted by the dredging, pile-driving, and increase in maritime traffic and noise.
As we pointed out in the federal lawsuit we filed on March 4 challenging the project’s approval, noise and disturbance from vessels interferes with these orcas’ ability to navigate, communicate, reproduce, care for their young, and echolocate the salmon they need to survive. While this population has declined to just 74 orcas, ocean noise is on the rise, roughly doubling every 10 years since the 1950s.
Increased maritime traffic is a major reason for the increasing noise pollution in our oceans, but it’s just one of the many ways people assault marine life with sound — through sonar and explosions from military exercises, seismic air guns used in oil and gas exploration, construction and dredging, large-scale commercial fishing, power generation and so much more.
All that increased noise is also traveling farther than it used to, a trend that will worsen with climate change. That’s because sound waves travel faster and farther in oceans that are becoming warmer and more acidic due to our fossil fuel addiction. At the poles, underwater noise is also created by cracking polar ice and the calving of melting glaciers and icebergs.
Recent studies have documented that anthropogenic ocean noise pollution has increased dramatically since the industrial revolution and that it’s harming marine life — from plankton at the base of the marine food web to the great whales — in ways that we’re just beginning to understand.
“Existing evidence shows that anthrophony affects marine animals at multiple levels, including their behavior, physiology, and, in extreme cases, survival. This should prompt management actions to deploy existing solutions to reduce noise levels in the ocean, thereby allowing marine animals to reestablish their use of ocean sound as a central ecological trait in a healthy ocean,” was the conclusion of the comprehensive review “Soundscape of the Anthropogenic Ocean” published in Science in February.
There’s a real urgency to reducing our ocean noise pollution, not least of which is keeping Southern Resident killer whales from going extinct. Noise generated by container ships and the maritime trade is continuing to increase as the human population and economy grows. And the push to further industrialize our oceans with more shipping, energy, deep-sea mining, and aquaculture projects could make our oceans much louder.
Now’s the time to do everything we can to reduce the relentless noise and chronic stress we’re creating for orcas and other marine life beneath the ocean’s surface. That means limits on vessel speed and numbers in coastal waters, restricting military training activities in whale habitat, ending offshore oil drilling and exploration — and conducting a full environmental impact study on the Seattle Harbor expansion and other projects like it.
