Monday, August 02, 2010
Top Science Story of the Week: Follow the Whales to Study Impact of Oil Spill
From Cornell University
Seven “marine autonomous recording units” have been placed in the Gulf of Mexico to document sounds in the ecosystem over an extended period of time. By listening in on whales that cruise the waters of the Gulf, researchers hope to determine where they are, how many there are and how they are faring since massive amounts of oil were released into their environment with the eruption of the BP Deepwater Horizon well over the past 3 months.
“This will be the first large-scale, long-term, acoustic monitoring survey in the Gulf of Mexico,” said Christopher Clark, head of the BRP team at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. “The whales are like oversized canaries in the coal mine – they reflect the health of the environment they live in. You wonder, ‘What can we do? What’s the impact of this?”
Clark and his team are collaborating with NOAA in an effort to discover the numbers and locations of whales and assess the potential impact of oil clouds drifting below the surface.
The team is anchoring recording units to the sea floor in an arc stretching from Texas to western Florida along the edge of the continental shelf. These units will record underwater sounds for three months before they receive a signal to let go of their tethers and pop to the surface for retrieval. After analyzing the data, the team will deliver a report to NOAA and other agencies involved in the oil leak response.
The recording units will listen for sperm whales and a small population of Bryde’s whales. They also will pick up sounds of fish and ship traffic. Some devices are being placed in areas believed to be unaffected by the oil; others will be close to the well.
This research is made possible through a partnership between the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Bioacoustics Research Program at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.
Read the full article here.
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