Listening to the Chukchi Sea

In their article titled Listening to the Chukchi Sea in the recent Polar special issue of ECO Magazine (Environment, Coastal and Offshore), Roberto Racca and David Hannay of JASCO Applied Sciences describe how an ambitious acoustic monitoring program helped advance our understanding of Arctic ecology.

From the article:

From 2006 to 2015, several oil and gas companies performed exploratory campaigns involving both geophysical sounding and test drilling in the northeastern Chukchi Sea. Some of these companies funded multidisciplinary long-term environmental projects to collect ecological baseline measurements and inform regulatory permit applications. The Chukchi Sea Environmental Studies Program (CSESP), the largest of these multi-year studies, included a large passive acoustic monitoring component. Led by JASCO Applied Sciences, the acoustic element of the program enabled scientists to describe how vocal marine mammals use the northeastern Chukchi Sea throughout the seasons, and to characterize the natural and human-made soundscape of the area.

The ambitious acoustic monitoring program that took place in these waters for many years had an unparalleled spatial and temporal scope. Its execution required the deployment of a dense grid of autonomous underwater sound recorders during the open water season and a smaller group of instruments over the winter months. The availability of [such] a large network of acoustic recording stations enabled the characterization of vocal behavior and mapping of marine mammal distributions over large areas through many years. Such investigations would not be feasible using conventional approaches such as ship-based or on-ice observations. […] These achievements advance our understanding of Arctic ecology and demonstrate the importance of environmental research to manage humankind’s expansion of activities into largely pristine regions. Monitoring studies like this are key to minimizing our impacts on those habitats and to the species that rely on them.

This special issue provides an extensive overview of the ground-breaking research taking place in the polar regions to better understand these remotely isolated yet critically important contributors to the richness of life on our planet.

Read the full article.

Browse the entire Polar special issue.