#VoxPopuli | The Tale of Modern-Day Sirens
by Rysa Ang
A sweet song fills the ship as you and your crewmates venture toward a cloud of fog that blankets your journey ahead. As the singing gets louder, a drop of water trickles down from the sky — a storm is about to begin. Yet, as your crew scrambles to prepare for the sudden change in weather, you find yourself mesmerized by several beautiful figures, serenading you just below the deck. You creep closer, hoping to see the faces that belonged to these voices. Before you know it, you have been devoured by the inky-black depths of their ocean — never to be seen again.
This is just one variation of the grim tales we tell about sirens, creatures that bewitch sailors and lead them to their deaths. Amplified by various depictions in media, the tales of sirens have made us wary of the sounds that we hear whenever we are out at sea. But with all the years that have passed since the middle-aged origin of these tales, what if we’ve been wary of the wrong sea sirens all along?
Our oceans are getting louder — not because of legendary sirens, but because of manmade marine tankers. As the demand for natural resources like oil and gas continues to grow, so does our use of seismic airgun surveys to discover deposits beneath the ocean floor. The song begins when the airguns used in these surveys rapidly release compressed air and form massive bubbles. Once these bubbles pop, however, they create loud impacts that travel quickly through the water — somewhat like a hundred gongs struck at the same time. Because of the ocean’s features, though, some of the sound waves are reflected back to the surface, where they are recorded by hydrophone arrays and analyzed by computer software to determine the presence of deposits below.
The song doesn’t stop there — it continues to haunt the seas for several weeks and months to come. A review published by the Marine Technology Society suggests that the noises created by these surveys can “reduce an animal’s ability to detect certain other sounds” via low-frequency masking from the seismic waves. This impacts auditory perceptions among various marine animals, especially those which make use of communication signals to survive. Marine mammals, such as dolphins and whales, may even be the most susceptible to auditory masking. This idea is similar to how we, humans, have a hard time hearing someone speak when loud music is playing in the background. The difference though is that we can stop the music — our marine animals cannot.
This is the tale of our modern-day sirens — the new song we should be wary of at sea. It is these manmade tankers and their airguns that haunt marine lives below. The good news though is that this tale has yet to reach its ending. We still have the power to rewrite the pages of this grim reality and sail away from the inky-black depths of our current future — one song at a time.
