Dr. Kaplan Auerbach said, “To some of us, it was just,“ Oh, these dangs are in my data. ”Humpback whales interrupted their search in the past for Mount Lō’ihi, Hawaii’s underwater volcano.“ We had tons and tons of whale songs, And for me it was just a complete noise in my data. “
But as this new study shows, this noise could be used to study the planet’s interior. She said, “That’s cool.”
“They will never replace air rifles,” said Dr Kona. The seismic waves of the fin whale are moderately weak, which means that their subsurface imaging is relatively low-resolution. “But it’s complementary. And it’s free.”
Although seismologists were keen to avoid marine life, the talk Transfer Explain in detail how the oceans have become noisy in recent years as a result of human activity. Finding more ways to use seismology for a fin whale might add a little to the cacophony. “It’s a win-win,” said Dr Kona.
In this study, the researchers had to locate the fin whales, like searching for the epicenter. They looked at times when each of the whale chirping sound waves directed directly at the seismometer and the sound waves bounce between the sea surface and the sea floor. The time difference revealed the whale’s distance. By making some reasonable assumptions about the typical swimming depth of a fin whale, they could track their voyages across the ocean.
This paper may be about the seismic benefits of fin whales, but this method may be beneficial to marine ecologists, Dr. Wilcock said. In recent years, seismographs on the ground have been trying this Tracking elephants And its population appreciated. The same principle can be applied to whales and animals Was born Via climate change, habitat loss, and the dismal legacy of commercial whaling. And like elephants’ sniffing seismometers, machine learning may someday listen to the songs of finned whales and independently detect different groups of fin whales, or individuals within those groups.
“We can use the tools of biology to study seismology,” said Dr. Kaplan Auerbach. “And we can use seismology tools to study biology.”