Transcript: DR. KATE STAFFORD on What the Whales Hear [ENCORE] /272
Ayana Young Welcome to For The Wild Podcast, I’m Ayana Young. This week we are rebroadcasting our interview with Dr. Kate Stafford, originally aired in September of 2020. We hope you enjoy this special encore episode. Hello and welcome to For The Wild Podcast, I’m Ayana Young. Today I’m speaking to Dr. Kate Stafford, whose research focuses on using passive acoustic monitoring to examine migratory movements, geographic variation and physical drivers of marine mammals, particularly large whales. She has worked all over the world from the tropics to the poles, and is fortunate enough to have seen (and recorded) blue whales in every ocean in which they occur.
Dr. Kate Stafford And if you know anything about the marine environment, you might know that light doesn't travel very far through water, sense, smells don't necessarily travel very far through water. But sound travels far and efficiently through water. So, all marine animals from snapping shrimp to whales rely very heavily on sound.
Ayana Young Kate’s current research focuses on the changing acoustic environment of the Arctic and how changes, from sea ice declines to increasing industrial human use, may be influencing subarctic and Arctic marine mammals.
She is a Senior Principal Oceanographer at the Applied Physics Lab and affiliate Associate Professor in the School of Oceanography at the University of Washington in Seattle and has degrees in French Literature and Biology from the University of California at Santa Cruz and Wildlife Science and Oceanography from Oregon State University.
Well, Kate, welcome to For The Wild. I am so looking forward to this conversation and to hear the soundscapes of the ocean and to be just engaged in this incredible world with you for the next hour.
Dr. Kate Stafford Thank you so much Ayana. I'm really looking forward to our conversation as well.
Ayana Young Well, I’d like to begin our conversation in recognition of the many songs the ocean body sings and holds…However, I also recognize that the question I’m about to ask you is temporal in nature, in that the ocean of today sounds radically different than the one that existed pre-industrialization, pre-globalization, pre-conquest...So, how does the underwater soundscape vary, and can you speak to what sounds our oceans are filled with today and why they are becoming increasingly louder?
Dr. Kate Stafford So sound travels really efficiently underwater. It can travel much further underwater than it can in air and sound underwater, is created by natural events like underwater earthquakes and volcanoes or by the wind rushing on top of the water and creating waves. We also have sound underwater that is created by biology, the animals that live underwater, the fish, snapping shrimp, whales and seals.
Increasingly though, we're having more what we call anthropogenic, or human driven sound in the water and these are sounds from ship propellers, their sounds from oil and gas exploration, their sounds from Navy sonars. And because of industrialization and globalization, and massive shipping, primarily commercial shipping across the oceans, especially in the Northern Hemisphere, levels of sound in what we would call the lower frequencies, so under about 1000 hertz have been on the increase and they've increased fairly rapidly, especially in the northern hemisphere. We humans, we hear from about 20 hertz, which is quite low to 20 kilohertz. Most of us are hearing range is somewhere in the middle there, something that's under 20 hertz, we would consider subsonic. So below our hearing range, and that might be an underwater earthquake, a volcano, the rumble of an elephant. Things that are above our hearing range are supersonic. You might think of the really high notes of a Piccolo or a dog whistle that the dog can hear and we can't. When I'm speaking, I'm probably talking to around 3000 hertz. And the reason we care about the frequency or the pitch of sound, is that different animals underwater make and receive sounds in different frequency bands. And we're really interested in knowing the intersection of where human noise overlaps the frequency bands that are used by animals in the water.
Ayana Young I wonder if you can give listeners a bit of a primer on the ramifications of increased noise pollution when it comes to marine life. I think most of us understand the impacts of sonar on marine mammals, but I wonder if you could describe just how loud human intervention is in the ocean? How does noise pollution attack social networks and the survival rates of our underwater kin and to what extent is the consciousness, communication, and knowledge of creatures like whales, deeply dependent on acoustics?
Dr. Kate Stafford Sound is really the most important sense for marine animals. We humans, not all of us, of course, but we humans tend to be very visual animals the way we navigate our world, many of us, is through our sight. For animals that live in the ocean, the way they navigate their world, the way they find mates, the way they find prey, the way they move through their three dimensional environment is using sound. And if you know anything about the marine environment, you might know that light doesn't travel very far through water, sense, smells, don't necessarily travel very far through water. But sound travels far and efficiently through water. So all marine animals from snapping shrimp to whales rely very heavily on sound. And as we increase sound levels in the ocean, what we're essentially doing is decreasing the communication space over which these animals can communicate with each other.
A good analogy might be if you live in a house that's underneath a freeway, you might have to talk louder to your family all the time, or you might not hear something that's in the next room versus living in the middle of a nice, quiet forest. Although I certainly understand that forests are full of amazing natural sounds. If you're in a room where there's a fan going on, or if you've got air conditioning on, and suddenly that fan stops, you just feel this sense of relaxation suddenly when that noise that you hadn't really noticed stops, so it decreases your stress levels. So we know that increasing sound levels in the same frequency ranges that are used by say whales, for instance, like ships, ships make noise in the same band, same frequency band that whales need to communicate, that decreases their ability to talk to each other. So either they have to change the frequency or the pitch of the sounds they make. Or they have to make louder sounds, which might take more energy, or they stop talking all together, which means we've essentially cut their communication line.
There's been a couple of really compelling research papers over the past decade that have come out that have really underlined this to me and the first one was led by a woman named Roz Rolland, and she was studying North Atlantic right whales, which are probably the most endangered large whale on the planet. And just after 9/11, after the terrorist attacks, not unlike what's happening with COVID, a lot of commercial shipping, and of course, most air transport completely stopped. But she continued to do her research on right whales where she was gathering their poop to look at stress hormones in their feces and what she found when she looked at noise levels in the ocean, which had gone down after 9/11 was the North Atlantic right whale stress levels also went down, which suggested that that these right whales and probably many large whales that are subjected to constant commercial shipping, they were under constant stress from these increased noise levels.
There's another really interesting report from up in the Arctic done by Susanna Blackwell and her colleagues and she looked at how bowhead whales respond to airgun pulses. And she found that as an air gun was distant, but the bowhead whales could just hear it, first they would increase their calling rates, but then as the noise levels got louder as the ship got closer, they essentially stopped calling altogether. So they had a dual response to this noise that was impeding their ability to communicate with each other.
Ayana Young It's so heavy to take this information in. I remember being in conversation with Hawk Rosales, who's the Executive Director of the InterTribal Sinkyone Wilderness Council, he's been successful at stopping the Navy from bombing off the coast of California for the past five years and he was playing sounds of what the bomb sounded like in the ocean and just these horrific noises that the whales would have to listen to in preparation for the bombing, and it's yeah, it's really intense. So thank you for going into that a little bit.
Dr. Kate Stafford So just imagine we can plug our ears, we can put a pillow over her head. What if you can't escape that underwater?
Ayana Young Yeah, I remember hearing this noise that was almost like this high pitch siren that just didn't stop for prolonged periods of time and I thought about that, they can't get away, and the maddening, the crazy making. I know how that would impact me. It's just really horrendous. And I've read that around 80% of communications for some species of whales have been disturbed by noise. And I'm wondering about the prolonged chronic stress caused by this constant noise. This disruption, especially in terms of reproduction, I read that noisy environments can hinder reproduction and parenting for other marine species. Can that be said for whales as well?
Dr. Kate Stafford We don't really know and part of that is because whales in the ocean are extraordinarily difficult to study. You know, they spend 95% of their lives underwater. And again, as I said, we humans tend to largely be visual animals and so our concept of what a pod of whales might be is, we see a few whales on the surface that are within a couple body links of each other and we assume that's a pod. But really, a pod or a group of whales might be a group of animals that is spread out over many, many kilometers, 10s, to even 100 kilometers, that maintain contact through using sound. So our concept of, of what a pod is, is really restricted by our human inability to conceive what's going on underwater. And that also restricts our ability to really determine specific impacts.
And that's why this study that Roz did with the hormone levels in the feces, I thought was really, really important. And the study that Susana did over many, many years of acoustic data from the Arctic, were really able to show these impacts but these are, unfortunately we really need long term studies because like you said, stress levels can certainly impact reproduction in humans. Absolutely. You know, noise stress levels impact us all the time and you don't really think about it, I don't think. But how do you tell that in the marine environment? And that's one of the really, the really hard things to figure out. You know, whales aren't going to, to just all of a sudden die through exposure to chronic ship noise. But what does that do to their reproduction? What does that do to their communication? Even at this point, despite our advances in technology and research capabilities, we still don't have a really good idea.
Ayana Young At this point, we are all familiar with the many physical changes Earth is undergoing due to climate change and habitat destruction, but I think it’s much less common that we think about the auditory changes happening around us, especially those underwater...It’s been said that you are essentially listening to climate change in the Arctic, can you elaborate on what this means? How do warming waters correlate with a noisier ocean?
Dr. Kate Stafford The Arctic is essentially warming two times as fast as the rest of the globe and the clear indication of global warming in the Arctic is the decrease in seasonal sea ice, both the extent of the thickness, and the age. And this change in the extent of sea ice has had a number of impacts on the soundscape. So, in the summer and fall, which might be called the open water season, we're hearing changes in the atmosphere. So we're hearing more wind noise in the water because there's less sea ice, you know, a heavy ice will dampen the sound of wind and dampen waves in the water, so with open water, you get more fetch, you get more wind waves. Incidentally, it also causes more coastal erosion, which is problematic for people who live on the coast. And so you're getting sort of background fuzz noise in the ocean, think of it as traffic where you can't distinguish one single truck or one single car, but you just hear the aggregate fuzz of all those cars. So we're essentially hearing changes in the atmosphere.
We're also hearing changes in the biology of the Arctic, we're hearing more sub Arctic species. So these are species that in the past might have come to the Arctic in the summer, just for a short period of time and then left as sea ice extent increased. Those are humpback whales, finback whales, killer whales, minke whales. We're hearing all of these species in the Arctic now, much later in the season, and much further north, because there is no longer any sea ice in September, October, November to push them out of the Arctic.
So we're changing the underwater natural soundscape of the Arctic and we can hear that by listening, and of course, what we also hear, and this is one of the biggest changes in the Arctic soundscape is the increase in shipping, both commercial shipping from tourism, and oil and gas exploration. These are things that are increasing and are on the increase. And certainly, I don't think that shipping will ever be as extensive in the Arctic as it is saying the North Pacific or North Atlantic, but still, you're injecting all these novel sounds at much higher levels into what used to be a fairly pristine environment in terms of acoustics, so the animals in the Arctic have not evolved, with lots of low frequency shipping noise or oil and gas noise. Now, on an evolutionary scale, neither have animals elsewhere. But animals outside of the Arctic, for the past several hundred years, have been subjected to the industrial revolution, but the Arctic itself essentially used to be really quite quiet. Now, that's not to say it's always quiet, sea ice is very, very noisy. The animals in the springtime are incredibly noisy. So, it's sometimes, the Arctic is a really noisy place, but it's a noisy place of animals and ice. Now, other times of year, the Arctic is a noisy place because we're hearing more wind and we're hearing increased shipping. And I should say we hear the shipping at times when a lot of these species are migrating, and so they need to keep in contact with each other.
Ayana Young I'm wondering are the noises that are being produced by warming waters as impactful on marine life as the underwater noise pollution that comes from commercial or extractive industry? Will our underwater kin simply become used to this new soundscape under changing climate regimes?
Dr. Kate Stafford Animals are quite adaptive, most species. So they may indeed become used to the sounds, but just because they're used to them doesn't mean it's necessarily good for the species. I mean, they still will have to adapt to increased noise levels. And part of the question comes, well, how do these noise levels and you touched on this earlier, how do they impact the overall population survival? And again, as I said, we don't really know that but what we do suspect is, what are the cumulative impacts of all of these layers and levels of sound and new sound in the underwater environment of the Arctic, and we just don't know.
Ayana Young So I was reading in preparation for this interview that the world’s oceans have absorbed over 90% of the heat trapped by greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, and this tremendous increase is significantly altering migratory routes of many species. Bowheads, belugas, and narwhals were once the only whales to be found in the Arctic, but now we are hearing about orcas and humpback whales traveling up north as well...There are so many conversations to be had on the implications of changing migratory patterns, but I’m really curious for us to explore this in terms of how place-based soundscapes are changing based on migration... With bowheads and humpbacks both singing, will this create a confusing atmosphere as more and more humpbacks cross paths with bowheads? And, are you beginning to see competition for food sources with the introduction of new apex predators like orcas?
Dr. Kate Stafford Now you've sort of hit on the crux of what I would say is my research right now. So I probably don't have any good answers for you, but both bowhead whales and humpback whales of all the large whale species, they're the only two species to sing complex, varying songs that change year to year and with both They changed within a year. And so these are the two great singers of the ocean world. And what we're hearing more and more, is humpback whales moving north, spending more time in the north, and they're there long enough that they start to sing. So singing behavior in humpback whales we know is a male reproductive display, both as a means of mediating interactions between different males. But we also suspect that females are eavesdropping, and we assume it's similar for bowhead whales.
So this singing ability is really important. For reproductive ability, we assume or for the possibility of reproducing. And, as I said, they both produce these complex songs that are capable of changing and bowhead whales in particular seem to have incredibly varied songs and they change within a week, within a month and they change completely between years. And so now that we are hearing the two singers overlap in the Arctic, the question is, what is this going to do to the acoustic ecology essentially, of these species? Are humpback whales going to suddenly start sounding like bowhead whales, or vice versa? And, you know, as somebody who studies underwater recordings, we're often not able to see the animals at all, like, am I gonna be able to tell the difference between a humpback whale and a bowhead whale eventually? But more importantly, does this change in song, how does this affect their ability to find mates and we produce and you know, we just don't know. With regards to competition for resources, whether that's food or acoustic space, again, I think we're still right on the edge of all of these changes. And, you know, with climate change, we say there's going to be winners and there's going to be losers. So maybe the sub Arctic species that can now exploit all this prey that's in the Arctic that's novel to them. They might do just fine. You know, some sub Arctic species can keep moving north, but at some point, you end up at the top of the world and there's not much further that you can go if you're a bowhead whale or a beluga whale, or a narwhal. So we're really at a point where things are changing almost so rapidly that I'm not sure we can predict what's going to happen. And what worries me is I'm not sure how we're going to mitigate this. How, how can we help change the trajectory of this process? Well, that's kind of something that keeps me up at night a little bit.
Ayana Young Yeah, it's interesting. When I first started to learn about more of the details of the atrocities of what was happening to the Earth. I thought I knew more or could find more answers than I can now. And it's a really strange place to be in to understand that the more that I learned, it almost feels like the less that I know. And with the speed that climate change is taking, it’s so hard to know what to do at this point because the systems of destruction are so intertwined with one another and they’re huge, you know, we're really in a big mess right now with the Anthropocene, extinction, and climate change and I appreciate your humility, and your devotion to the waters and the whales and the other creatures and just being and listening so deeply to them and so I really appreciate the humility that you come to this with.
Whales are kin that I think so many of us find incredibly captivating in their behavior, symbolism, and physical manifestation...I’m particularly moved by the lifespan of bowheads as they are able to live up to 200 years old, which means that the bowhead whales of today, know of a natural world that was, obviously not completely silent, but without the violent new disturbances of today, they are creatures that have a living memory of something totally different...And of course, the bowhead is vividly connected to every facet of life in the Arctic... So, can you share with us your relationship with these creatures and how they are faring with an increase in noise? What is so special about the bowheads songs and what do future projections look like for bowhead in regards to climate change? Although, I know that we are also in this point where we can’t necessarily say.
Dr. Kate Stafford I have to say I feel incredibly fortunate to have been able to spend so much time just listening to the underwater soundscape of the Arctic and to bowhead whales and, it's something that has really grabbed me. You know bowhead whales, in any way you can possibly think about it, are superlative animals, as you've said they can live 200 years or the Inupiaq say they live two human lives. You know, they're the only baleen whale, so a whale with baleen, which are keratin plates in their mouth, and they use those to feed. It's the only baleen whale to live year round in the Arctic. They've got the thickest blubber or any whale, they can break ice up to half a meter thick, and they've got the longest baleen too of any whale, which helps them feed. And they sing these amazing, amazing songs. And the songs they sing, as I said, change frequently and we don't know if it's, if individual whales have their own song or if they're constantly changing songs. But within a population if you listen over a winter, you might hear 60 or 70 very distinctly different songs. And a lot of the reasons we don't know a whole lot about bowhead whale singing behavior, is it happens in the polar night. It happens under 24 hours of darkness, and often 95 to almost 100% sea ice cover. So it's something we can only listen to, we can't actually go out and see it. Although I would love to be in a submarine under the water some winter just listening to whales.
But bowhead whales are, you know, truly remarkable animals not only for their singing behavior and their physical adaptations to the Arctic, but they are a keystone species in the Arctic and they're also incredibly important to the subsistence of Arctic Indigenous peoples. Bowhead whales provide subsistence, they provide culture, they provide community to lots of communities around the Arctic and as you said, a bowhead whale that lives 200 years certainly carries a lot of history with it. But so to the people of the whale who live with the bowhead whale, they carry traditional knowledge of thousands and thousands of years. And so for me, that makes the bowhead all the more fascinating. I won't say that whales are necessarily any more special than bees or ants or pangolins, or any of the animals that have adapted on our planet into these little niches. It's just for me, they're really a species that is so fascinating because we know relatively little about them still, there's still so much to know. And yet, I also have the feeling not unlike what you said just now is, boy, the more I think I know, the more I realize I don't know when I may never know. So bowhead whales are really this iconic animal of the Arctic that I think a lot of people don't even know exist. And what's particularly bittersweet about bowhead whales is that there are many large whales, particularly right whales, bowhead whales. These are animals that were brought to the brink of extinction by commercial whaling primarily in the 17th and 1800s. So early on, they were hunted both for their baleen which is sometimes referred to whale bone as whalebone, even though it's not bone at all. Baleen was the plastic of the 1800s. It's flexible, it lasts long, baleen was used to make buggy whips and parasol ribs and, my favorite, lady's corsets. So baleen was used for many, many, many things in the 17th and 1800s. And the other reason that bowhead whales were brought to the edge of extinction was their blubber, which was boiled down for lubricant for soap, for lighting. And so the irony is not lost on me. But just as bowhead whales were heading towards extinction due to commercial whaling, not Indigenous whaling, commercial whaling, oil was discovered on land, and we started pumping oil out of the Earth. And because the price of kerosene then became less than the price of whale oil, because of course, whales were harder and harder to find. So whale oil became increasingly expensive and more expensive to obtain. The discovery of oil on land may in fact have saved some of these species like the bowhead whale from extinction, and yet now, our exploitation of oil on land is really one of the main drivers of climate change, which is now bringing us back to this idea of animals being in trouble. It's a catch-22 right.
Ayana Young I know that North America’s largest oil field, Prudhoe Bay, is found in Alaska - which is to say that the Arctic has experienced its fair share of industrial activities regarding oil exploration, all of which has occurred with very little recognition from global oil consumers...and I’m thinking about this moment right now when the US government is dying to continue icebreaking, drilling, and exploring in a cowardly attempt at reviving the failing US economy, with the Trump administration using emergency authority to further gut the Endangered Species Act and a number of other environmental laws...and so, we must remain vigilant...Should we see another attempt to allow offshore drilling, can you speak to the ramifications of oil and gas exploration in the Arctic? How are oil and gas really driving a complete extinction of the Arctic, in terms of species, culture, and ice?
Dr. Kate Stafford It seems sort of ridiculous that we're propping up a false economy by trying to drill every last drop of oil out of the Earth. In the Arctic, it's problematic for a number of reasons. And I'm mostly familiar with the Pacific Arctic, which tends to be a relatively shallow shelf sea until you get into the deep Arctic Basin. But what I can tell you about the US Pacific Arctic is beyond the noise of oil and gas exploration and that includes both air guns, which essentially, so an air gun images the ocean's bottom to look for pockets of gas essentially. So the best analogy I've been able to come up with is you make a really loud sound in the water, it goes through the water column into the sediment, and then it bounces back. And the bounce back tells geophysicists what they think might be under the sediment. So it's very similar to doing an ultrasound, except a very low frequency ultrasound of a fetus in, in a woman's uterus. So an ultrasound essentially uses sound waves to image the fetus and the sound bounces off of tissues and bones of different densities and gives you a picture of the fetus. So essentially, using an air gun is a way to get a picture of potential oil and gas deposits underneath the ocean bottom, and that can be a very, very loud endeavor that can go on, you know, they'll make an air gun pulse every 10 to 20 seconds, for hours or days in the Arctic, air guns are heard throughout the oceans of the world, especially in the north and south Atlantic in the Indian Ocean, and then you've got the ships that are affiliated with those, and then you've got drilling. That is also a fairly noisy endeavor. So that all injects noise into the ocean. And until recently in the Arctic, it was noise that was limited to maybe a couple months of the year, because then the ice would come in and you'd have to move the ships out. You'd even have to move the drill rigs out.
Off of Prudhoe Bay, they actually built an island in the Beaufort Sea that stands above the sea ice. So you've got that noise. But then you've also got the risk of an oil spill. If you think about the US Arctic, we don't actually have any deepwater ports in the Arctic, we don't have any ports where you could respond rapidly to an oil spill, you would have to send ships up from Dutch Harbor, which is 1600 kilometers south of Bering Strait, I need to double check that. So there's just not the infrastructure to immediately respond to an oil spill. And then of course, even though the ice is decreasing, and things are warming, you're still gonna have sea ice formation in the winter. So suppose an oil spill starts at the very end of the open water season. Essentially, as the ice comes in, you can't clean up. I mean, it took them five years to cap the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and that was in the Gulf of Mexico where they don't have sea ice, and they've got lots of ports and they've got lots of ships. They can be put in place in the Arctic, we don't have that.
So, oil and gas both has a risk for increasing noise in the water but also for massive ecological devastation, if there's an oil spill, and it can't get cleaned up really quickly,
Ayana Young I think it is important for folks to look at the track records of these large oil companies and their spill responses because it's been horrendous. And anytime an extractive resource corporation tries to calm our worries about spill response we have to be really diligent at looking at what they're offering; is their money put aside if there was a spill response to happen? Where are the emergency materials coming from? Like you were talking about in the Beaufort Sea, it would be impossible to respond immediately. And probably not even within months. You know, I'm thinking even about the Exxon Valdez spill 30 years ago, and just all of the mishaps that happened when the oil tanker hit the ocean floor and created such a disaster and how long it took for them to respond. It was the fishermen who went out first to respond with buckets trying to clean up the oil and the herring have still not returned to the Prince William Sound 30 years later.
So I think spill response education for those of us who are wanting to spend our time devoted to protecting the oceans, we really need to be diligent and I'm grateful that you spoke to that. And to continue on this thread, I was noticing that over the past century, the Arctic has warmed at a rate nearly twice that of the rest of the world, and most scientists predict that the Arctic Ocean will be ice-free in the summer over the next two decades...To me, and to our listeners - the potential of an ice-free Arctic is really devastating. Not only will it forcefully restructure the more-than-human world, but it will also decimate cultural ways and a body of knowledge that has largely remained the same for millenniums...But of course, capitalism sees opportunity in any disaster, and shipping corporations are already eyeing an ice-free Arctic in terms of the possibility of new routes. But just because we can do something, doesn’t mean we should...Can you speak to the possible increase in shipping routes? Is this preventable? How will the ushering in of more transportation and noise further disturb the ecological, cultural, and spiritual dimensions of this place, assuming that global trade even exists in the next two decades?
Dr. Kate Stafford So, for me, the Arctic is an incredibly special place, like there's no place I would rather be than out on the sea ice in the spring in the Arctic. But I understand that that's actually a position of privilege for me to be able to do that, for the people and animals who live in the Arctic, a lack of seasonal sea ice is going to be highly problematic. I mean, that was the first I think I read last week, the very first commercial ship went through the northern sea route, which goes along the northern coast of Russia without an icebreaker escort. And there are companies that are already eyeing not just the northern sea route or the Northwest Passage, but actually a trans polar route. So going right across the pole, because that's a big shortcut between the Pacific and Europe. And you know, we're going to have increasing noise, of course, and increasing risk of oil spills. Now, admittedly, the International Maritime Organization is trying to be really proactive. And there, they've got a polar code that applies both to the Arctic and to the Antarctic. So I feel like in some way people are trying to get ahead of this. And you know, people I've talked to who live in the Arctic, they say they will adapt but if you think about no summer sea ice, you think about nowhere for walrus or ice seals to rest, nowhere but land for polar bears to hunt - so that's going to increase human wildlife conflicts. And yeah, just because we can do something, doesn't mean we should and, and part of it is, you know, you and I both live in a country that uses way more than our fair share of natural resources. So I think globally, we need to decide what is our priority as human beings? Is it one day shipping plastic stuff to our house? Or is it maybe waiting an extra week and taking into consideration the Arctic, and other areas that are being impacted by climate change? Because really, at some point, it's up to each of us individually, to be responsible for this and but I also really think that one of the waves we need to think about the Arctic and the rest of the globe and maybe this pandemic is giving us a chance to, some of us a chance, to slow down and think about it is what do we want to see our future like? How do we affect change? And more and more I’m convinced that it's by encouraging people to get out and vote, at all levels of government, local, national, we have to think about putting people in charge who understand the value that the Earth provides to us. You know, the oceans provide almost half of our oxygen. And we can live without WiFi. We can't live without oxygen. We need to understand that the Earth, it's our home, this is the best planet in our universe. I don't want to go to Mars. We have a planet that provides us oxygen and water and food and shelter. And we need to remember that and I think part of the reason people don't is because we are disassociated from the wild. Right? We don't get out in nature often enough. And in some cases, that's because people can't because they're working two or three jobs or they have limited mobility to get out in the environment. But I think any way we can encourage people to think about being in the wild, helps us value what we get from nature, not just in terms of food and shelter, but also in terms of a connectedness to the rest of the planet.
Ayana Young I think it's complex. And I do think there is a spiritual dimension, and a relational dimension of how we understand how to be stewards, how to be in reciprocity, how to be in relationship with the Earth. And when we try to separate ourselves in a multitude of ways that we have been in this modern dominant culture, we suffer and we are suffering and the earth is suffering and it's clear, it's clear to so many more of us at this point than it was even two years ago. Even six months ago, and I think it will become more and more crystalline as we see more and more devastation and changes all around us. And beyond these trade routes, and these industrial commercial endeavors, I'm also reflecting on my time spent up in Alaska and just witnessing the inundation of cruise ships and how tourism and tourists are buying into this curated fantasy of what Alaskan life is like while simultaneously polluting and exploiting the area. And while thankfully, I'm not sure if the cruise ship industry has any plans of reemerging as long as COVID-19 remains, I'm curious to hear or to understand or know about the extent of the tourist industry in terms of air pollution and disruption to the migratory route in the Arctic.
Dr. Kate Stafford Well, I don't know that that there has been enough tourism of, you know, massive boats yet to see that. Certainly we had the Crystal Serenity, which was the largest ship to ever go through the Northwest Passage, maybe four years ago. But clearly tourism is on the rise because people want to see the Arctic and they want to see it before it melts, not really aware that going to see it might in fact, be contributing to that. I don't know what we have to see. What I would say is right now, particularly in the Alaskan Arctic, the Coast Guard is looking at shipping routes. They've got a ship access route study, and are trying to figure out where is the best place to route both tourism and commercial vessels and I think commercial vessels will probably be much more tonnage going through. So how can we do that to minimize the impact on coastal communities and species migrations? And I think one way that we could start to address this is by looking at areas that we think or that we know are important for critical life events for fish, marine mammals, and essentially restrict access to those regions during those seasons, restrict access to commercial or tourism ships. How do we come up with solutions? As opposed to just thinking about the problems and part of the way we do that is to understand the problem. So do we limit the number of ships that go through? Do we slow ships down? Because a slower ship is a quieter ship? A slower ship can stop sooner? What do we do? It'll be really interesting, as you said this summer, you know, certainly up in Alaska, I think almost all tourism in terms of large boats has stopped. So can we then start listening underwater? Or can we continue listening underwater to areas that for the first time in maybe decades, are going to be really quiet places like Glacier Bay in Alaska. It's not up in the Arctic, it's in Southeast Alaska, but it's an area that regularly has lots and lots of cruise ships. How is Glacier Bay going to sound this summer, as opposed to last year, the year before or perhaps next year? This interesting slow down with COVID may provide us with a means of understanding what regions sounded like 50-60-80 years ago, and so it may give us a new baseline that we can strive to maintain. So if we understand this year that, you know, all of a sudden, we're seeing or we're hearing whales in areas that we used to hear them or didn't hear them before or seeing them, is that a reaction to less noise? I don't know. It'll take some time to figure that out. But I think we're, we're kind of in the middle of a giant experiment right now. And this might be our control year, especially with regards to tourism shipping. But the question is, I've always thought this about, about zoos. So do people being exposed to the beauty of the Arctic? Or the beauty of an animal in a zoo? Does it make them more committed to help save that place? Does it make them feel more invested in saving a special place or special species in their day to day life? What I'm equally concerned with these days, I mean, I think climate change is really the overwhelming issue of the Anthropocene, and from climate change, we see things like COVID, we see things like the burning of the Amazon, but we're also seeing inequalities both for other humans, but also for other animals. So how do we come up with a more equitable world?
Ayana Young It is the question of our time and I'm grateful for all of the movement leaders and folks who are committed to sitting in the complexity of that question, even if we can't come up with solutions right away. And maybe those solutions look a lot different than what we thought, maybe it's not about ingenuity, or the next idea or the next technology. Maybe it's much more about our relationships. Maybe it's much more about slowing down and looking our addiction to fossil fuels straight in the eye and really starting with ourselves, especially those in “developed” worlds who have the privilege to use far more than the global majority, and are really pushing this extinction crisis. And yeah, these questions are complex. And I do want to mention that this month in June of 2021, one of the largest petroleum spills in modern Russian history took place when a thermoelectric power plant in the Siberian Peninsula spilled due to it being built on permafrost, that's now melting. So, you know, I know that oil spills aren't your specialty, but as someone who has spent a great deal of time in the Arctic, I wonder if you have anything to share on how dangerous it is to be pursuing industrial development in the Arctic or, I mean, we have talked about that a bit. But you know, even other reflections on the rate and scale of change that is unfold In the Arctic today or any other clarity or details you have about what just happened in the Russian Arctic.
Dr. Kate Stafford What I can say is, if you look at a map of the Arctic, fully half of it is the Russian Federation. And I would say, we still have relatively little information coming out of Russia about changes...What we hear mostly is the northern sea route and shipping. I would love to hear more from my Russian scientist colleagues on the changes they're seeing in the Arctic. As we mentioned earlier, you know, oil spill is incredibly difficult to respond to and manage in the Arctic. It's a remote area, it does get cold, it can be really foggy, there aren't any. There are very few deepwater ports. There are some on the Russian side actually, where you can send out ships that can respond to an oil spill cleanup. And, and that's really problematic. And a lot of it is problematic and then depending upon where you are in the Arctic, you know, oil will disperse in higher temperatures, but it's still colder in the Arctic, it might disperse under a lot of wind. And if you've got sea ice that's going to impact the dispersion abilities. A lot of the Arctic free chains are built, starting with ice algae, and then flowing down to the benthos to the bottom of the ocean, as opposed to being a pelagic system where you've got fish in the water column. So, especially in the Pacific Arctic, you've got ice algae that then feeds krill oil or maybe pods. And then the ice is also a nursery for Arctic Cod, which were one of the major prey species for many, many species, including other cod in the Arctic, but also beluga whales and many of the seals, bowheads eat krill primarily. And so, oil in the Arctic is going to go into the sediment. And we've got grey whales and bearded seals, and walrus that are all, they're all bottom feeders. They're digging up the sediments. They're feeding the sediments. So we don't know what such an oil spill that's coming essentially out of a river into the Arctic Ocean could do. And as you mentioned that the Exxon Valdez earlier, and the impacts of the Exxon Valdez have still been seen decades later. The same with the Deepwater Horizon spill. Those impacts are still being seen in coastal Texas and Louisiana even now. And those are areas where you could get to actually do a cleanup. We just can't do that efficiently in the Arctic, not in time. And then, you know, this rupture of the tank caused by melting permafrost, is also impacting people's houses in the Arctic in many areas. People who live in the coastal Arctic, have ice cellars, which are essentially caves that have been dug out of the permafrost, and that acts as your refrigeration throughout the year. And that's where people store whale meat and seal meat. And the ice sellers are collapsing. So yes, you could say, well, people should just use their freezers and their electricity, but, but that costs a lot of money. And by losing ice sellers, you're also kind of losing tradition. It's tricky. But so the question is, in all this doom and gloom, because there's a lot of doom and gloom, how do we, how do we find a sense of hope? Because we know that as a species, humans tend to not want to confront something that they see is impossible and tragic. You know, we need some glimmer of hope. I'm trying to find one. I'm just not being very good at it.
Ayana Young Well, I think that there's something about taking in the grief and not just jumping to the next false hope, which I think we have been inundated with false solutions and these forced glimmers of hope, and we put our resources and energy and our dreams behind them. And then we find out 5-10 years later, 20-30 years later that oh man, that was not that was not the place we should have been putting our energy that actually did not help. So I think there is something about sitting with the enormity, sitting with the grief, taking time, even though we feel things are urgent, but actually taking time to realize how to move forward in a different way than we have. And so my hope if I could say that right now is where I find my way forward, is in that relationship, that love for the Earth, and just kind of getting myself out of that urgency mentality - not to say that I'm not doing things every day. It's it's not it's more of a framework in my mind than it is in terms of not actually tangibly doing things. I think we need to be up to date with the fact that the Endangered Species Act and NEPA have just been basically gutted by Trump under the COVID crisis as he's putting it and you know, what's happening with the trade routes, I think we need to stay educated. I think we need to push our local governments and our national governments to do the right thing by voting, educating ourselves by pushing, by protesting, I think all of that is still very necessary. But there I think is a deeper component that we'll have to grieve through in order to come up with solutions that feel more long term. And I know that there has been doom and gloom in our conversation. But it's very true and it's what we have to know. And I don't think we would be respecting the bow heads or the belugas or the narwhals or the orcas if we didn't actually sit in the truth of what's happening to them and all of the other creatures in the waters and the oceans. But I think it would be nice to end our conversation with a story from you. Perhaps a whale song that moved you in a way or an experience you had in the Arctic or otherwise, just anything that comes to mind in the moment that really sparked your love and your devotion to this place to these more than human kin.
Dr. Kate Stafford You know, I said earlier that my favorite place to be is on the sea ice in the Arctic in the spring. And part of that is because you feel like that's when the Arctic is waking up from winter. And you'll be out on the ice and it's this, this landscape, seascape of white, and blue. And hopefully it's not foggy. And all you see is ice everywhere you look. But when you put a hydrophone which is an underwater microphone down in the water, it is if there's this whole other world opened up, you hear the trills of bearded seals and you hear the songs of migrating bowhead whales and beluga whales. And then later in the spring in the Arctic, sea ice starts to break out and these leads open between the land and the sea ice. And then there's this migration that I think probably rivals the migrations of the Serengeti, where you have 10 or 20,000, bowhead whales swimming through and 10 times that of beluga whales, and we have hundreds of thousands of eiders flying through the sky. And perhaps you'll see a polar bear off in the distance and it's just a place that is just so beautiful and so special and so quiet. I mean, it's really just the most magical place for me on the planet. But it's an area that seems so cold and remote to us and yet is so full of life. And that's my favorite place in time on earth
Ayana Young Thank you, Kate, so much for taking this time with us and transporting us to the Arctic with you and to be reminded that there are these absolutely incredible kin that are moving through the waters every day even when we don't remember that they are still very much a part of the fabric of this world. And yeah, I appreciate your work and your devotion to them. So thank you again for this time.
Dr. Kate Stafford No, no, thank you very much. It's been a really nice way to spend an hour or so sort of gives me some more energy to keep going.
So the sounds that are that I've sent you or either recorded with a dipping hydrophone, which is just like a microphone on a wire that is put down into the ocean or from an instrument that was moored or anchored underwater for a year in the Pacific Arctic. And you'll hear the songs of bowhead whales. The trills of bearded seals and knocks of walruses, even the high squeaks of belugas and then listening to these different sound sources, sometimes they all occur at the same time, you can hear how the different species have essentially developed an acoustic niche in the ocean. So, they each have their own little acoustic niche where their songs are amplified and radioed. So they may overlap. But if you listen you can hear each of these different voices distinctly in the ocean.