Original subtitles

March 15, 2000... the day of infamy,

as far as I'm concerned.

I woke up in the morning,

started having coffee, telling our team of people

that had just arrived that, you know, the chances

of seeing a beaked whale in a 10‐day period are slim.

My assistant, Dave,

came running inside and saying, "Ken!

Ken! There's a beaked whale right on the beach,

right in front of the house!"

And sure enough, there was a goose‐beaked whale swimming...

Moving his tail anyway,

as if it was trying to get up the beach.

In my mind, or maybe out loud,

I said,

"what are you doing here?"

They're supposed to be in deep water.

So I pushed it back out to sea.

(Woman) Go, baby, go!

It swam out a little ways.

And it came back in.

We did this two or three times.

And then some neighbors came along and said,

"there's another one down at the point."

Covered it with, uh, sheets and kept splashing water on it,

while the rest kept trying to push the other whale out.

And then our neighbors came and said, "there's another whale

just another 200 yards up the beach from us."

As the day unfolded, we had people calling

from all over the Northern Bahamas saying,

"a whale strand here, whale strands there."

Something was causing all these whales

to wanna abandon the deep water

and get the hell outta there.

It was, uh, kinda devastating.

Animals that I had grown to know

over a 10‐year period were now dead.

They were trying to get away.

I was driven to find out why.

(McAdams) Everywhere on Earth,

we can hear the songs of life...

From the smallest insects

to the largest animals on the planet.

[Whale singing]

But most of us only hear half of this living symphony.

There's a completely different orchestra

playing beneath the surface of the sea.

(Man) One of the most memorable moments

I have in my life

was the first time I put on headphones

in the arctic.

It's gray and white.

It's almost sensory... Complete sensory deprivation.

I can't smell anything.

I can barely taste anything.

We found a little opening of water,

in which I dropped two underwater microphones.

Put on the headphones, I was completely amazed.

[Animals calling]

Bearded seals coming out of the ether,

as though they were from "the martian chronicles."

[Animals calling]

Beluga whales chirping and chattering and clicking.

And then the bowhead whales,

roaring low‐frequency moans.

And I was like, "Oh, my God!

This is fantastic!"

(McAdams) Chris Clark has been recording

the symphony of life on Earth

for more than 40 years.

He has built one of the largest collections

of animal sounds on the planet.

(Clark) I listen to the world.

And to me, song is life.

It is the essence of who we are.

And it joins us all.

The problem is, in the ocean,

we are injecting enormous amounts of noise,

so much so that we are basically

acoustically bleaching the ocean.

All the singing voices of the planet

are lost in that cloud of noise.

(McAdams) This accumulation of sound

is changing the entire ecosystem underwater.

Some of the animals most directly affected

by this Sonic invasion

are the largest ever to have lived on Earth.

(Clark) They're so large.

And they're so dramatic and magnificent.

They are highly conscious animals.

They have self‐awareness. They think.

They have intellectual capabilities that rival ours.

And their graciousness...

(Balcomb) They're mammals. They're just like us.

They're a very specialized form

of life on this planet that,

basically, rules the ocean.

All whales can hear.

They have to for their survival.

[Whales calling]

(Clark) The ocean is a completely different place

acoustically than in the air.

Sound can travel enormous distances

very, very fast,

whereas light doesn't travel very far at all.

And the whales have evolved to take advantage of that.

They can hear storms that are 1,000 miles away.

(Woman) For humans, well, it's important for us to hear,

but not nearly as important

as it is for whales, dolphins

and many kinds of fish.

They're relying on being able

to sense their environment acoustically.

Whether it's finding their buddies,

knowing where food is, knowing where the shoreline is.

Well, they certainly have eyes.

And they use their eyes.

But they're far more reliant

on their hearing to live.

Think about it... even in the clearest ocean water,

visibility is nothing close to what you have on the land.

And 100 feet is considered to be really good.

But you can look up at the stars

and see light that has been transmitted

over millions of miles on the land.

You can look and see mountains in the distance, miles away.

(Man) Just as air is a brilliant medium for light,

water is a brilliant medium for sound.

To give you an example,

in the early 1990s,

a group of scientists

put a noise-making device, uh,

down in the Southern Indian ocean.

They wanted to see just how far sound would travel.

The sound that they produced carried into the Atlantic ocean,

into the Pacific ocean.

It carried as far

as those researchers were listening.

Their furthest hydrophone, or underwater microphone,

was positioned off of Washington state,

which means that the sound traveled some 17,000 kilometers

and was still audible.

[Whale calling]

And the whales see the ocean through sound.

So their mind's eye is their mind's ear.

(Man) So I'm in this tent with an Inupiat whaling captain.

And I want the ears for science.

I wanna get the ear bones of the whale

so that I can give 'em to a colleague,

who is a scientist, to understand,

how do they hear?

What... what is so different about these animals?

And this Inupiat whaling captain just looked at me.

And very deliberately, he said,

"do you know that the ears are the entrance

to the soul of the whale?"

And now, I even get emotional remembering that statement.

The ears of this animal

are the entrance to its self‐consciousness,

to its life, to its history, to its future.

(Man) The Bahamas stranding, well,

we had specimens that had died within hours.

And I knew

that collecting a fresh specimen

and freezing it as soon as possible

would provide the best evidence

that would show what sort of damage

was going on internally.

I transported two beaked whale heads

and a dolphin from Bahamas

and got 'em over to a commercial airplane

going to Boston.

Trucked the specimens right over to the cat scans

at Harvard medical school and,

by 2 A. M.,

had seen the evidence of sub-arachnoid hemorrhage

around the brain and blood around the ears.

Uh, they were definitely, uh, impacted.

I knew that it was a human‐caused stranding.

I was very concerned that, uh, we learn

what specifically are we doing that

is causing these mortalities,

and not do this again.

(McAdams) Humans have been changing the sound of the oceans

since we first started exploring the seas.

But our ocean presence has exploded

over the last 5 decades.

(Earle) The world that these long‐lived creatures

have experienced is changed on a geologic scale.

We are seeing just a different planet.

(Man) Some whales, they live to be 150 to 200 years old.

When those whales were teenagers,

the world was quiet. Okay?

So if I disrupt your ability to hunt,

or if I disrupt the ability of a female

to make a choice between the best singers

because she can only hear the ones

that are closest to her,

what's the impact of that?

(Earle) Getting lost in the ocean

must be terrifying to a young whale.

Can't find its mother. Can't find its family.

A lost whale, in that sense,

would be, likely, a dead whale.

(Man) Uh, I've known about whale song for a long time.

And I've heard it many times.

And also astounded by how...

The distance that their songs can travel,

that they have to communicate, sometimes, ocean‐wide.

Um, it's like a telephone.

And so it would be logical

that their hearing would be as powerful

as their reach when... when they sing.

I make my living as a musician.

I've subjected myself to industrial levels of noise

because of it.

And my hearing is impaired.

And so I'm increasingly more aware

of the Sonic world we live in.

I prefer silence.

I was born and raised, um,

next to a shipyard in the North of England.

At the end of my street are some of the biggest,

um, ships ever constructed on planet Earth.

They would launch them with the, uh, timbers cracking

and the drag chains being pulled.

And as a small child, I...

I found that, uh, stirring and frightening.

No, you wouldn't think about what was going on under the sea.

It was just some... A means of, you know,

transporting things or transporting people,

rather than, uh, to go underneath it.

(Woman) The dominant change

in the conditions of underwater noise

has been from commercial shipping.

So, ships are the way we really move goods

on this planet.

We move over 98 percent of the stuff

we need to get from point A to point B using ships.

(McAdams) At any given time,

there are an estimated 60,000 commercial chips

traversing the world's oceans.

(Man) They're enormous. They're like cities on water

with far fewer people.

And the sound of all of those ships,

all in the water at once,

has literally filled our oceans with...

With noise.

(Man) One of the things about noise in the ocean

is that humans are not aware of it at all.

It's one of these out of sight, out of mind kind of things.

It really is, in a... In a sense, a cacophony

of sound

that surrounds the whales at this point.

(McAdams) Paul Spong is the Co‐Director of Orcalab,

a Whale‐research Station

on Hanson Island off British Columbia, Canada.

He and his team use hydrophones to record

and study the sounds of orca pods

in the Pacific Northwest.

(Spong) There are a host of reasons for caring about whales.

Certainly the beauty and their lifestyle.

With orcas, you have, for example,

the most powerful creature in...

On the planet living an utterly peaceful life.

That's impressive.

Each of the family groups has, uh,

their own special dialect

that we listen to.

So we can understand a lot about who's there just from...

Just from the sounds that they make.

We know when they're hunting. We know when they're resting.

We know when they're socializing.

We know when they're having a great time together

down at the rubbing beaches

'cause we're listening all the time.

Cruise ships, the freighters

are very recent phenomena in their history.

Now, sound is everywhere around them,

much of the time.

When a cruise ship comes along.

And a cruise ship kinda comes around the corner

into the acoustic field of that... of the whales.

You can hear what happens.

This is a group of G clan whales.

[Whales calling, clicking]

[Droning]

Anyway, the whales, uh, are calling away.

And they, uh,

uh, try to continue it for a little while.

Then they get totally drowned out.

Noise interferes with hunting,

with a whale's ability to find fish.

Well, if you reduce the amount of food

that whales can get,

then you're directly impacting their well‐being, their lives.

(Woman) I think when you listen to the hydrophones,

it's hard to think

that that noise does not have an impact on the whales.

I mean, sometimes, it... Listening on the headphones

gives you a headache within 10 minutes.

You have to take the headphones off.

You have to turn the volume down.

And I just think, you know, "the whales,

they can't turn the volume down."

[Cacophony]

(Man) Several years ago, I was at a meeting

about ship noise in Hamburg, Germany.

And we went down and saw some of the newest

and largest container ships.

And they're striking.

They're basically skyscrapers turned sideways

with giant engines put on the back of 'em.

Some of the sound may come from the engines

that's transmitted through the hull.

But the majority of it comes from what is happening right

at the propeller.

[Bubbles bursting loudly]

(McAdams) It's called cavitation.

That's when the bubbles created by the blades

of the propeller collapse and burst underwater.

It's not so much the collapse of an individual bubble.

It's all of them, eh,

at once creating a very loud hiss.

The ship's engines generate noise as well.

Basically, the way ship engines are historically built

is you bolt 'em to the frame.

And then it vibrates the frame and makes that sound transmit

through all the steel or the hull

and out into the water.

(Man) Over the last 60 years,

the number of ships moving over the global surface

of the world has increased dramatically.

You can look at the curves.

And it's just going up and up and up and up.

It really is just like a highway, you know,

the Los Angeles freeway or the long island expressway.

And if you look at the taillights of those cars,

it would be solid light.

That's the shipping Lane, where,

in this case, the light

is all the noise from all the ships.

Is there any evidence that all of this noise

is making life difficult for whales and fishes?

Most of humanity lives in the Northern hemisphere.

There's a fraction of the percentage

of commercial shipping in the Southern hemisphere.

Well, we have Southern right whales.

They're cousins of the Northern right whales.

Those populations are going gangbusters.

But up North, their cousins...

Same kind of habitat, everything else...

They're struggling to get by.

Why is that?

You can say, "how many ships are going through the area?"

But so what?

How... how do you show that that has any influence

or any impact or makes any difference?

(Woman) Well, we really needed a laboratory for that.

We needed a place where you could draw a line

around it and ask, "okay.

Within these waters, what are those contributions?"

(McAdams) Researchers chose Cape Cod Bay near Boston,

an important habitat of North Atlantic right whales.

(Man) And what was surprising in that was how bad it was.

(Man) You see right whale calls illuminated

like little firefly light.

And then, every so often,

several times a day, a ship will come in.

Comes in like a flood light.

It obliterates the whale's ability to hear.

(McAdams) The study revealed that North Atlantic right whales lost

up to 80 percent

of their ability to hear the songs

of their friends and mates.

That's a really dramatic loss of space for these animals

during really critical time periods.

It's just ripping the communicate system apart.

Are they not getting enough to eat?

And are they stressed out?

So there, you get a linkage to the whole reproductive cycle,

to the whole biology.

There may be 450 of them left in the entire ocean.

That species is fighting for its life right now.

(Balcomb) I joined the Navy in March, 1967.

I learned how to fly, got my wings.

And got stationed at a Sosus station,

which was sound surveillance, undersea.

The operations were that you listen to hydrophone systems

in the ocean for enemy submarines.

(Man) Sosus...

That name was top‐secret.

Now, in 1991,

the Soviet union was collapsing.

And the U. S. Navy offered up Sosus.

I walk in the building,

High security, the whole thing.

And it's like there are maps all over the walls.

There's all this machinery.

And the way, I metaphorically speak of this...

The world I've been living in fits underneath the head

of a pin in the ocean.

This system, this is the Hubble telescope.

I can listen anywhere in the ocean

I want to at any time.

Someone says to me, "hey, doc.

You think you could use this for studying whales?"

And it was, like, "expletive deleted."

"Are you blipping kidding me?"

And it was in that room,

I literally crossed the beams

pointing to a blue whale singing off of Ireland.

I was listening to it from Virginia.

[Whale calling]

(McAdams) Since biologists have been given access to Sosus,

it has become the single most important tool

for listening to whales ocean‐wide.

This listening system has also allowed scientist to track

the rise of human‐produced noise

in the ocean over time.

(Balcomb) Large commercial shipping

has kind of a rumbling like a distant,

uh, thunderstorm all the time.

When I was in the Navy, that was just a fact of life

in the '60s, '70s, '80s, '90s

and even today as it...

The noise environment in the ocean

is doubling every 10 years.

[Growing static]

(Woman) There's different ways that sounds can affect animals.

I mean, there's that underlying ambient noise level

that's rising and rising and rising that interferes

with communication and their movement patterns.

And then there's the more acute,

kind of, traumatic impact of sound.

And that's causing physical damage

or just a really strong behavioral response.

It's fight or flight.

Basically, all my professional life,

I've been responding to marine mammal strandings,

Dolphins, whales and seals.

Sometimes, when we think of a mass stranding,

it's not much animals

throwing themselves on the beach,

but being out of habitat.

One example is in Madagascar in 2008.

As we flew in,

going into this very small, very rural area,

we asked the pilot if he would do a tour.

We had been told there were 100 to 200 melon‐headed whales

in an estuary.

They were 65 kilometers away from the open ocean.

And I think our hearts fell

at that point because we looked at it.

And we said, "it's a huge distance to go."

Most of the animals were in pretty tough shape.

They looked thin, dehydrated.

These are animals that probably were stranding

at some point during the day, getting sunburned,

abrasions, like, cuts and bruises

from being up in the mangrove swamps.

We herd the whales

just like, uh, like how we would herd cattle.

We... we move boats the way

you would ride a horse behind cattle.

One right there.

Trying to move these animals very slowly out into open water.

As the day would wear on,

you could just see them deteriorating.

They were becoming slower, less responsive

to what we were trying to do.

In the end, we probably saved a handful of whales.

Most of them died.

And then our job was to go in

and figure out why they were there.

(Woman) In the end, we probably saved a handful of whales.

Most of them died.

And then our job was to go in

and figure out why they were there.

These animals weren't sick.

They weren't injured.

We ruled out the things that we knew it wasn't.

And the only smoking gun left

was this oil and gas exploration work

being done offshore that coincided

in time and location with this event.

(McAdams) Prospecting teams,

commissioned by an Exxonmobil subsidiary,

were hunting for oil off the coast of Madagascar,

near the mouth of the river.

They were using a special industrial echo sounder

that emits sound waves to map the sea floor.

[High‐pitched beeping]

(Moore) Exxonmobil stopped all of the work that they were doing.

And they provided volumes of data.

When I was reading through all of it, one thing caught my eye.

And it was a series of satellite photographs

of this region.

And they were claiming these images showed

that there were animals stranded prior to the work

that they were doing offshore, so they couldn't have caused it.

In the images, there were these dark objects

lined up perpendicular to the water.

And they were claiming

that these were all whales that had stranded.

And I'm looking at 'em, like... I've been doing strandings

for almost 20 years.

And I've never seen animals beach themselves

in such a perfect pattern.

And I was like, "those are boats."

Those are dugout canoes used by local fishermen.

That was the moment that... That I got really angry.

And I was, like, "you know, now you're just...

There's no way you can believe that."

They were throwing everything at us

to say it couldn't have been us.

And I looked at that and I said, "no.

There's no way."

(McAdams) An independent scientific review panel

came to the same conclusion as Moore and her team.

The whales were most likely trying to escape the noise

of the industrial echo sounder.

But fossil fuel companies are doing much more

than just mapping the ocean with waves of sound.

(Man) More and more and more, what you're seeing

is deep ocean prospecting for oil and gas.

So the modern form of dynamite

is found in the form of airguns...

[Air blasting loudly]

Most of which goes vertically down into the ocean.

It reflects off the Earth's crust.

And then you create an image of the composition of the Earth,

and you search for oil and gas.

And then you have sets of them,

10, 20, 30, 40 of them in a...

What's called an array.

It's a big matrix of them behind a ship.

And they all explode simultaneously.

And there are multiple surveys, all setting off these charges

at a regular rate of 10 seconds

or 12 seconds.

And the survey goes on for months at a time.

If you were listening in the ocean,

you could hear the regular explosions of these sounds

coming from Africa, South America,

Great Britain, Canada.

And now it's also invading into the Arctic.

Airguns have been shown to have

an enormous environmental footprint.

In baleen whales, the great whales,

they have been shown to silence animals.

They've been shown to cause animals to flee, uh,

large areas of habitat.

The areas we're talking about are enormous... in some cases,

documented over literally

hundreds of thousands of... of square miles.

[ Whales calling, air gun blasts in distance ]

These companies are able to take resources

from the global commons...

Hydrocarbons, in this case...

And exploit those

and damage the ocean ecosystem without cost.

That, to me, is intolerable.

(McAdams) The sound of seismic prospecting for oil and gas

is changing life in the oceans.

But it's also changing life for people

who depend on the oceans, living on land.

(Man) This coast has made

thousands of generations able to survive.

All my relatives before me lived from this.

I've been a fisherman for many years.

What is happening now is a disaster to us.

Oil industry is hunting oil and gas on our fishing grounds.

[Airgun blasts]

Catches immediately were reduced

by 60 percent.

This was massive.

And this was clearly the seismic shootings,

the blastings.

Then, after some time, not coming back...

It's not coming back. Why is that so?

It should come back

if everything was normal in the sea.

If this is going to... to go on,

those blastings in the sea,

in all the world's sea,

we are going to kill ourselves in the end.

Because we are killing our food.

This is happening all around... around the world.

We know it. But we...

It seems like we are not able to do anything about it.

(McAdams) We've been successful before

in acting to protect the health of the oceans

and the largest animals on Earth.

There was a time when the oil of whales

was the natural resource used to fuel our world.

(Man) The great whales were literally pushed

to the brink of extinction

when everything was fair game.

It was a total horror story.

What happened in the early 20th century

is that that practice became industrialized.

Whalers started using large factory ships.

And they began decimating populations.

(McAdams) The consequences of human consumption

were apparent to legendary oceanographer

Jacques Cousteau, who battled against commercial whaling.

Most countries agreed to stop whaling in the 1980s,

and some whale populations have rebounded since then.

Jacques' son, Jean‐Michel, driven by a similar passion

for the oceans and the largest animals on Earth,

continues his father's legacy.

(Cousteau) My father, when I was a kid,

created a movie, very well‐known,

which has put the ocean in everybody's home,

called "the silent world."

Well, it was pretty silent then.

The big difference between the past and today

is that we've created a lot of noise.

I wish we were making music, but we're not.

When you're in a place

where there may be whales and dolphins,

put a mask on with a snorkel.

Go in 5 feet of water

and close your eyes and listen.

[Animals calling]

It's fascinating.

My first real encounter with a whale was in Patagonia.

The first time I saw a really, really friendly humpback whale

was at silver bank, Dominican Republic.

It was three humpback whales in Hawaii.

(Man) When we first came to Hanson island,

we brought a little kayak along with us.

And I started paddling around with the whales

to see if I could understand more about them.

We had two guys onboard.

They were just, sort of, like, space cadets.

One of 'em was a... a Vietnam vet

that had been shot I don't know how many times.

And had... every bone in his body

had some kinda metal plate or shrapnel.

Anyway, he just wanted to see a whale, you know?

And we're telling him, "well, you're on the wrong trip, guy.

We're not gonna get near one."

Big fog bank came in and surrounded me.

And I got totally lost.

I didn't know what to do.

I didn't know where the whales were.

I didn't know where I was.

The current was taking me.

I had my flute onboard.

And I picked up my flute and started play,

probably to calm me down.

And after a few minutes, uh, the whales came by.

As they were moving, they were coming toward me.

They could've gone somewhere else.

They knew I was there.

And all of a sudden, I felt something under my flippers.

And then the whale came under the boat

and the first mate was freaking out,

like they're all gonna die.

And just lifted me out of the water.

Whale lifted the boat up on its back and, you know,

it was clear out of the water.

I put down my flute and picked up the paddle

and started following them.

And, uh, after a little while, I got lost again.

So I stopped paddling and picked up my flute

and started playing it.

And they came back around me again.

(Clark) And I dove down,

and I looked her in the eye.

We were looking at each other.

When you look in the eyes of a whale, uh,

they're actually looking...

They're seeing your soul, you know?

And if you're perceptive, you'll see their soul.

And I reached out and touched her.

I could have touched them.

Took its flipper, and just...

Laid it on the head of this guy

from... you know, the guy that was all shot up.

You know, he was just so excited.

He was sitting there playing

with the barnacles and stuff on it.

And... and the first mate was thinking,

well, he's gonna get his head chopped off.

When you are little wee, wee diver there,

they know you're there.

They flip them and fold them back.

Because they're totally aware of your presence.

And they don't wanna hurt you.

(Man) Finally, uh, I came to an island

that loomed up out of the fog,

and landed and waited until the fog cleared.

And I would say, one of the...

One of the profound experiences I had...

To me, these are some of the most, uh,

emotional experiences I've had.

That was it. I was in love.

Right? It was... that was it.

[Whale calling]

(Sting) I was listening to the noise

that sea mammals and fish are all subjected to,

which was painful to me.

I... I can see that it would... it would cause a...

A psychosis, you know?

Day after day...

(Man) Hearing really developed as an animal detection system,

the primary means of establishing an alert

that you had to get away, get away quickly.

Because really, it was a matter of flight or hide is...

Were your only modes of survival.

Our system's stress in response to noise

comes from this environmentally animal necessity

of avoiding a threat.

So we hear sirens on the street...

Every one of those sirens, it can be shown,

you're going to get some elevation in heart rate,

some vasoconstriction, release of stress hormones.

All of these different stress markers happen to you.

So we're getting this barrage of stress

even when we don't perceive it as such.

If you've ever been

in an incredibly loud club

or a loud party or a loud restaurant,

and there was a moment when you actually

felt vertigo and nausea

because you didn't think

that you could survive there another moment,

and you burst out the door...

Imagine what it is for these marine species

that have no door to pass through to get away.

There's nowhere to go.

(Man) Few years ago, there were a group of researchers

who had been taking fecal samples

of North Atlantic right whales.

They saw something really funny

in their data taken from 2001.

Those fecal samples registered fewer and fewer stress hormones.

They looked more closely

and they found that their samples

seemed to turn around at a particular date.

And that was September 11th.

(Man) After September 11th,

there was a halt to so much of shipping traffic.

And that fall in shipping traffic

seemed to correlate with a dramatic fall

in stress hormones in right whales.

They didn't see this in any other year.

There's a direct, significant correlation

between the amount of ship noise

and the physiology

and the stress levels in these animals.

It's a devastating finding.

It's shocking because it's so measurable,

what was found in the wake of the attacks.

(Balcomb) One of the first things they teach you at,

uh, the naval officer academy

is he who rules the ocean,

rules the world.

And it's true.

I talked a friend into going for a flight

the following morning of the stranding.

We searched around and found more specimens.

But we also saw military ships,

U.S. Navy destroyer

and some other warships.

So then I just put the two and two together.

(McAdams) The missing piece of the puzzle for Ken balcomb

was the U. S. Navy,

an institution he had served in

with distinction during his early career.

(Balcomb) The warships were bouncing their sonars

with very high intensity and frequency sound.

[Sonar squealing]

A screeching tone is hard to listen to.

It's just overpowering.

I can't imagine anything more absurd

than dropping acoustic bombs in downtown cities.

It's... it's equivalent.

(McAdams) Naval warships use a technique

that mimics the natural abilities

of whales and dolphins.

(Balcomb) They'll send out a click

and listen for the echo off a target,

and know how far away it is

and how fast it's moving and even what kinda target.

Sonar is the principal submarine detection system

used by the U. S. Navy

and other navies of the world.

(McAdams) Joel Reynolds has spent much of his career

fighting in the courts to protect the oceans.

(Reynolds) The Navy developed something called active sonar.

And this is the system that they use to protect

our massive aircraft carriers with 5,000 sailors on them.

In its simplest terms,

it involves generating extremely loud sound underwater

to detect targets.

(Balcomb) It's in a sweep.

So when the sweep is pointed right at you,

you get the full intensity of it.

And then, about a minute later, it does it again.

(Reynolds) We began to investigate.

We learned that they had no permits.

They'd done no environmental reviews.

There were no safeguards,

uh, built into the program

to protect the marine environment.

(McAdams) The impact of active sonar on whales and dolphins

has been clearly documented in the Bahamas case

and others where animals have been killed.

(Man) When biologists have studied their bodies,

they have seen an array of very disturbing pathologies.

Bleeding around the brain, uh,

lesions in organ tissue,

all consistent with,

uh, decompression sickness or the bends.

Divers know that they have to surface gradually, uh,

when they're ending a dive.

Otherwise, nitrogen can build up in the blood

to the point where it damages the body.

That is precisely

what seems to be happening to beaked whales.

(Balcomb) They're deep‐water animals,

all of a sudden they just leave the water.

And now they can't decompress.

(Jasny) After the Bahamas strandings occurred,

the Navy denied it was involved.

It took the better part of 2 years

for it to admit culpability.

The chief of naval operations,

the head guy,

was convinced, finally,

that, uh, yeah, that it's their fault.

They did it.

(Man) There are many other navies in the world

that use this same kind of technology

to detect submarines.

Many of them follow our lead, of course.

It's a global problem in its truest sense.

(Man) Probably the most visible effect

of ocean noise, uh,

has been this series of mass strandings

of whales on the beaches around the world.

Time and again, in the Bahamas,

in the canary islands, off Spain, off Greece,

they have turned up along the coast.

The Navy was acting lawlessly for years, uh,

before we started taking them to court.

It's not an easy thing to... to fight the U. S. Navy.

I think a lot of us look at the Navy

as people acting in the public interest.

And it's a little painful to have to go after them.

But once we did, uh,

they started doing environmental reviews.

They started getting permits.

They started a research program

which is now the largest source

of marine mammal research funds, probably, on the planet.

The trick is to get the Navy to move beyond research.

We're at the point

where we know enough to say

that the Navy has to do more

to reduce harm from its exercises.

(Reynolds) We don't believe there's an inconsistency

between defending the United States

and protecting the environment.

Whales and other marine life should not die for practice.

(McAdams) Three years after the Bahamas stranding,

Ken balcomb was watching orcas

from his new home in Washington state.

(Balcomb) The ship was about 3 miles out.

It was just, like, deja vu of the Bahamas.

(McAdams) Three years after the Bahamas stranding,

Ken balcomb was watching orcas

from his new home in Washington state.

(Balcomb) It was just, like, deja vu of the Bahamas.

Uh, I was just dumbfounded.

Yeah.

[Sonar screeching]

Shut the damn thing off.

[Sonar screeching]

Before the ship started utilizing its sonar,

the whales were feeding at salmon bank,

south end of this island.

Something very unusual was happening.

All the whales gathered together in groups

and went very close to the shore.

We started seeing every porpoise.

They were all just streaking,

as fast as they could go, away from the sound.

And a minke whale was going away from the sound.

(McAdams) Navy sonar is like an enormous predator.

When whales hear it, some go silent, stop foraging

and abandon their habitat.

Repeated exposure to sonar can harm whole populations.

You didn't have to have a hydrophone to hear the sonar.

It was virtually unbearable for us on the porch.

I can't imagine what it must've been like underwater.

In the following days, 11 porpoises

were found on the beach, dead.

You know, one of the complaints from an admiral was that,

"well, you know, we can't worry about the fish."

Nobody comes in the Navy, that I know of,

to say they wanna hurt a whale.

When I was in the Navy, I had the honor

of commanding 3 warships...

The commodore of 13 warships

and then chief of staff of naval surface forces.

If you know that there is a whale in the area,

unless you're at war,

you're... you're trying to avoid using those sonars.

[Sonar screeching]

(Man) Mid‐frequency sonar can be pretty loud.

Putting sound in the water can have an impact

upon whales and other mammals that inhabit the ocean.

It's also important to understand

that what the sound is looking for

are a potential enemy

whose intent is to kill sailors

and destroy our ships.

(Parker) What's at stake

if we are not good at anti‐submarine warfare

is not only the threat

of loss of life of America's sons and daughters

and our friends and allies,

but also those capital ships that we invest in.

Ships are expensive,

and obviously human beings can't be replaced.

So we have to be very good at anti‐submarine warfare.

(Honigman) I don't believe that National Security

and Environmental Protection are inconsistent at all.

I think there has to be an accommodation

between those two principles,

where the Navy can operate in a way

that has the minimal impact upon the environment

and still perform its training

and, if necessary, its mission.

We all value security.

We have to think of security, however, in the broader terms

of what we're doing to our life support system.

And that means considering life in the ocean

as a part of what makes our lives possible.

[Cacophony crescendos]

(Balcomb) We can't support the human population,

at the rate we're growing,

with a diminishing ecosystem.

[Whale song]

And they're the sentinels of whether or not

it's healthy out there.

Killing 'em off is not sensible.

The typical mode that we all have is status quo.

It's easier, in some ways, not to do anything

than it is do something.

So, we are at this tipping point.

This is a problem that we can solve.

The question is whether we have the political will to solve it.

That's really what it comes down to.

(Earle) I attended a shipping conference not long ago

where the organizers started the conference by saying,

"if only we knew 50 years ago

what we know today about sound in the ocean,

we could design propellers

that are not only much quieter, but are more efficient."

Designing a quieter ship

will result in increased fuel efficiency,

which is reduced cost to the owner.

We're talking about ships that have fuel costs,

on a per‐vessel basis,

tens of millions of dollars a year.

So, designing more efficient vessels

just makes a whole lot of sense.

It is in the U. S. Navy's best interest

to be as quiet as possible when we operate at sea.

Hull forms are changing dramatically

over the last several decades.

And you can just look out and see

that you have more catamaran‐shaped hulls,

where you have less metal actually in the water.

And so that is reducing the sound

and also reduces the friction,

which means that it's more fuel‐efficient and quieter.

(Man) Researchers and Navies have been modifying their ships

to reduce noise for... for years.

Commercial ships can reduce the noise

that they put in the water by some 90 percent.

That's significant.

Another way to reduce the noise is go a little slower.

(McAdams) Chris Clark also advocates

speed limits for cargo ships

as well as rerouting shipping lanes

where they are clearly impacting habitats.

(Clark) The average waiting time for a ship

when it gets to port,

before it unloads its cargo,

is 3 days.

Wouldn't it make sense to maybe go a little slower

and save billions of dollars in fuel costs?

And then when you get to shore you have a very efficient system

of getting your cargo off the ship,

rather than sitting there for 3 days.

So reducing noise could be a win‐win‐win.

A win for marine mammals having to deal with noise in the ocean.

A win for the climate and for humans

who have to deal with air pollution.

And even a...

A win for industry, saving money over the life of a ship.

(Balcomb) In terms of human life, there is a threat

that they have to prepare for and then practice for.

I think they should avoid the problems.

And you avoid 'em by not practicing

in where you know sensitive animals are.

Breeding areas, feeding areas, migratory routes...

When there are animals present, test someplace else.

[Blasting]

(Sting) We are searching harder every day

for more and more oil everywhere.

So if there are... there is a technology

to make it less, uh,

abusive to the... to the Sonic World,

then we should... We should embrace that,

no matter what the cost.

Are there alternative technologies,

other than setting off a bomb every 9 seconds,

that are available to us today?

And the answer is, you bet there are.

And you can be profoundly quieter than the explosion.

For example, there's an emerging technology

called marine vibroseis that doesn't produce an explosion.

It produces a continuous, very low‐frequency sound

that is thousands of times less intense and less invasive

than an explosion.

And it also produces a much higher resolution image

of the Earth.

It won't cure the problem.

There will still be impacts.

But it would at least reduce the fever.

The one good thing about ocean noise

is that when you stop making noise,

it goes away.

[Animals calling]

(Man) I've always believed, from the very beginning

of my struggle, my fight, that we...

We are going to win this.

I have become a grandfather.

I'm all the time thinking about who is coming behind us.

Our children, our grandchildren

and who comes behind them.

What are we leaving for the next generations?

Will they survive?

(Earle) Things that we could not know,

going back 50 years ago, now are coming into focus.

The ocean, through all of human history,

has made it possible for us to thrive,

to live, to have a secure future.

We can't go back.

But we can make things better going forward.

This is the time to return the favor.

My father used to say, "people protect what they love."

And I kept telling him,

"how can you protect what you don't understand?"

And now we're starting to understand.

And that information,

we need to bring it everywhere, in every school.

We need to get the kids out, wet.

I have a daughter who's 4 1/2,

and she hasn't seen a whale yet.

And I wanna make sure that she sees a whale

and that her kids see whales and their kids

see whales.

(Man) Oh, my God!

(Group) Oh, my God!

(Man) Look at his belly! Look at the white!

Wow! Whoa!

Oh, my God!

Okay, that might have been one of the greater moments

of my life.

There's something incredible about that experience.

And the planet is not just about us.

We're... we're one species here.

And it's incredibly irresponsible for us

not to be better stewards.

And it's not about science... Science plays a role in it.

You use science.

But it really comes down to, what do we...

What do we value?

We value a living ocean.

We're putting the ocean at risk.

And if you put the ocean at risk,

you're putting all of us at risk.