Latest / The Infographics Show Podcast / Something at the Bottom of the Ocean Is Making Creepy Noises

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Something at the Bottom of the Ocean Is Making Creepy Noises · The Infographics Show Podcast

• 0:06
  Speaker 1: Imagine floating in the pitch black ocean, right, just total
• 0:10
  Speaker 1: sensory deprivation exactly. The pressure is crushing, it is cold,
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: utterly dark. You expect absolute silence, because.
• 0:18
  Speaker 2: That's what we're used to on land, right, silence in
• 0:21
  Speaker 2: the dark.
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: Yeah, but suddenly a sound rips through the water, A
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: massive low frequency.
• 0:27
  Speaker 2: Roar, just tearing through the deep.
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: It traverses thousands of miles, a sound so powerful, so gargantuan,
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: and it defies logic. I mean, it simply shouldn't exist.
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: You are listening to the unknown.
• 0:39
  Speaker 2: It shakes you right to your core. The sheer kinetic
• 0:42
  Speaker 2: force of it is just it's unbelievable.
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: Welcome to beyond infographics. You are about to embark on
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: an acoustic exploration. We are stepping into a world that
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: is vibrating constantly all around you.
• 0:53
  Speaker 2: The planet is literally a twenty four to seven orchestra.
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: And humanity has been completely deaf to it.
• 0:59
  Speaker 2: Well until now, Yeah, we have been missing the most
• 1:01
  Speaker 2: complex symphony on Earth.
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: In my recent research, I started tuning into these hidden frequencies.
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: I really wanted to know what the planet is actually saying.
• 1:08
  Speaker 2: It's a completely different language.
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: It really is, so our mission today is to uncover
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: the secret conversations of the natural world. We are tracking
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: down forty four year old oceanic pinks.
• 1:20
  Speaker 2: Ooh, that one is wild, right.
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: We are listening to whispering whales. We will even decipher
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: the acoustic clicks of plants, you know, crying out when
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: they're thirsty.
• 1:30
  Speaker 2: I think once you understand the mechanics of this soundscape,
• 1:33
  Speaker 2: your entire perception of the environment just completely shifts totally.
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: So we begin in the place we historically assume as
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: the most silent, the deep ocean, the abyss. Yeah, we
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: picture this impenetrable, quiet void, but my research points to
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: the exact opposite. It is an acoustic super highway.
• 1:51
  Speaker 2: It is because water is denser than air, much desser, right,
• 1:55
  Speaker 2: and that density completely changes the physics of sound propagation.
• 1:58
  Speaker 2: You know, in air, sound waves lose energy pretty quickly,
• 2:00
  Speaker 2: they scatter.
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: You just get absorbed by the atmosphere.
• 2:02
  Speaker 2: Right exactly. But in water, the molecules are packed so
• 2:06
  Speaker 2: tightly together. A sound wave hits one molecule and it
• 2:09
  Speaker 2: immediately transfers that kinetic energy to the next.
• 2:12
  Speaker 1: I think of it like a massive fiber optic network.
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: You drop a low frequency sound in the ocean, and
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: it practically loses no energy. It just keeps going.
• 2:21
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and then you have to add the so far
• 2:23
  Speaker 2: channel to that analogy.
• 2:24
  Speaker 1: The so far channel, say, I'm fixing and ranging right.
• 2:27
  Speaker 2: Got it. It's a specific layer in the ocean where
• 2:29
  Speaker 2: the speed of sound is at its absolute minimum, and
• 2:32
  Speaker 2: that's dictated by temperature and water pressure.
• 2:35
  Speaker 1: So what happens to the sound.
• 2:37
  Speaker 2: There, Well, the sound waves get trapped in this channel.
• 2:40
  Speaker 2: They bounce back and forth, refracting up and down, but
• 2:43
  Speaker 2: they never hit the surface or the ocean floor, so
• 2:46
  Speaker 2: they can travel for thousands of kilometers without dissipating.
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: Which brings me to the summer of nineteen ninety seven.
• 2:53
  Speaker 1: I was completely captivated by this while looking through my notes.
• 2:56
  Speaker 2: Oh, the Equatorial Pacific event.
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: Yes, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration NOAA as these hydrophones.
• 3:05
  Speaker 1: There are underwater microphones left over from the.
• 3:07
  Speaker 2: Cold War, built to track Soviet submarines.
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: Originally exactly now they listen for underwater volcanoes, but that
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: summer they picked up a heavyweight sound. They called it
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: the BLUEP.
• 3:17
  Speaker 2: The acoustic signature of the BLUEP was just unprecedented. It
• 3:20
  Speaker 2: was ultra low.
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: Frequency, and it was picked up everywhere was it?
• 3:24
  Speaker 2: It was captured by multiple sensors across the Pacific. To
• 3:27
  Speaker 2: be heard across that fast of a distance, the source
• 3:30
  Speaker 2: had to be unfathomably.
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: Loud, louder than any known biological.
• 3:34
  Speaker 2: Creature, right, and honestly, it terrified us, it really did.
• 3:38
  Speaker 2: Why do you think that is Well, humans have a
• 3:41
  Speaker 2: profound evolutionary discomfort with the unknown. The deep ocean represents
• 3:45
  Speaker 2: the ultimate.
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: Void, total darkness, crushing pressure.
• 3:49
  Speaker 2: Exactly, It's entirely alien to our biology. So when we're
• 3:52
  Speaker 2: confronted with a booming, inexplicable sound from that abyss, our
• 3:57
  Speaker 2: minds do not default to complex geology.
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: We default a survival mechanism.
• 4:02
  Speaker 2: We imagine a threat, we imagine a monster.
• 4:04
  Speaker 1: We went straight to sci fi horror. I mean people
• 4:06
  Speaker 1: were talking about the crack in Cuthulhu slumbering in the Pacific.
• 4:10
  Speaker 2: Oh. Absolutely, the psychological thrill of the bloop was a
• 4:12
  Speaker 2: possibility that we were not the apex presence on this planet.
• 4:15
  Speaker 1: But the scientific reality uncovered years later through rigorous spectrogram
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: analysis was monumental in a completely different way.
• 4:24
  Speaker 2: Right. A spectrogram being a visual representation of sound frequencies
• 4:27
  Speaker 2: over time.
• 4:28
  Speaker 1: And biological sounds like whale songs. They have specific harmonic structures,
• 4:32
  Speaker 1: right they do.
• 4:33
  Speaker 2: They look organized on the graph, But the bloop did not.
• 4:36
  Speaker 1: It was chaotic.
• 4:37
  Speaker 2: It was the acoustic signature of ice, ice quakes, massive glaciers,
• 4:42
  Speaker 2: and Antarctica calving into the sea.
• 4:44
  Speaker 1: I have to admit when I first read that, I
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: felt a massive lead down, like we wanted a prehistoric
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: sea monster and we got an ice cube cracking.
• 4:52
  Speaker 2: But consider the scale of that ice cube. We're talking
• 4:55
  Speaker 2: about ice shelves, the size of small countries.
• 4:58
  Speaker 1: Okay, that's fair.
• 4:58
  Speaker 2: When a fracture, probably through kilometers of solid ice, the
• 5:02
  Speaker 2: sheer kinetic energy released is astronomical. The friction of millions
• 5:06
  Speaker 2: of tons of ice grinding against the seafloor creates this massive,
• 5:10
  Speaker 2: low frequency shockwave.
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: Okay, let me reframe this from myself. The fact that
• 5:15
  Speaker 1: a chunk of ice breaking off the coast of Antarctica
• 5:17
  Speaker 1: can be heard near the.
• 5:18
  Speaker 2: Equator, which is thousands of miles away.
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: Thousands of miles that is a testament to the raw,
• 5:24
  Speaker 1: untamed forces of our planet. It is the Earth flexing
• 5:27
  Speaker 1: its muscles.
• 5:28
  Speaker 2: It dwarfs, biological noises, entirely. It's destructive and creative simultaneously.
• 5:34
  Speaker 2: The Bloop was just the planet revealing its mechanical.
• 5:36
  Speaker 1: Power before we go deeper into these mysteries. If you
• 5:40
  Speaker 1: are enjoying this journey into the unknown, take a second
• 5:44
  Speaker 1: to rate Beyond Infographics five stars. It really helps us
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: keep these acoustic explorations going.
• 5:49
  Speaker 2: Yes, please do so. Back to the bloop, it wasn't
• 5:53
  Speaker 2: a monster, but humanity desperately wanted it to be.
• 5:57
  Speaker 1: We really did. We have this insatiable need for monstas,
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: which leads directly into our historical obsession with sea creatures.
• 6:04
  Speaker 2: It's a great point. There is a brilliant conceptual idea
• 6:07
  Speaker 2: in modern oceanic literature called the Blue Museum.
• 6:10
  Speaker 1: The Blue Museum. Is that a real place?
• 6:12
  Speaker 2: Well, no, it's not a physical building. It's a theoretical
• 6:14
  Speaker 2: space that bridges rigorous oceanography with human folklore. Oh love
• 6:18
  Speaker 2: that it archives our acoustic mysteries right alongside our cryptozoological imaginations.
• 6:24
  Speaker 2: It acknowledges that when humans face an informational void, we
• 6:27
  Speaker 2: fill it with narrative, and we have.
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: Been filling that void for centuries. I was reading Christopher
• 6:32
  Speaker 1: Columbus's journals from fourteen ninety three.
• 6:34
  Speaker 2: Oh, the mermaid sighting.
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: Yes, he is sailing off the coast of Haiti and
• 6:39
  Speaker 1: he spots three mermaids rising high out of the sea.
• 6:43
  Speaker 2: Right. But he was a bit disappointed, wasn't he?
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: He was? He notes in his journal they are not
• 6:47
  Speaker 1: as beautiful as they are painted. He specifically writes they
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: have masculine faces.
• 6:52
  Speaker 2: Because he was observing manatees sea cows.
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: He was looking at a blobbery marine mammal. But his expectations,
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: forged by centuries of European maritime myth, completely hijacked his
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: visual perception.
• 7:06
  Speaker 2: He expected a mermaid, so he saw a mermaid.
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: It's wild.
• 7:10
  Speaker 2: This psychological projection collides constantly with the grim science of
• 7:14
  Speaker 2: oceanic decomposition. Like why do we consistently find so called
• 7:17
  Speaker 2: sea monsters washed up on beaches?
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: Yeah? Why is that?
• 7:21
  Speaker 2: The answer lies in forensic marine biology. There is a
• 7:24
  Speaker 2: phenomenon known as the globster.
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: I came across that term in the research. It sounds
• 7:28
  Speaker 1: like a B movie monster. What exactly is a globster?
• 7:31
  Speaker 2: It is the heavily decomposed remains of a large marine animal,
• 7:34
  Speaker 2: usually a basting shark or a sperm whale. Okay, so
• 7:36
  Speaker 2: just a regular animal, right, But when a massive creature
• 7:40
  Speaker 2: dies in the ocean, it undergoes specific stages of decay.
• 7:44
  Speaker 2: It enters the bloat stage, gases swell.
• 7:47
  Speaker 1: The body sounds lovely. Oh, it gets worse.
• 7:50
  Speaker 2: Then comes active decay. The skin slips off entirely. The
• 7:54
  Speaker 2: tissues undergo subonificationapodification. The fats turn into a hard, soapy
• 7:59
  Speaker 2: substance called a post here.
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: So the creature loses all its defining features exactly.
• 8:04
  Speaker 2: For instance, the lower jaw of a basking shark is
• 8:06
  Speaker 2: loosely attached. It rots and falls away early in the process.
• 8:10
  Speaker 2: Oh wow, what remains is a small brain case and
• 8:13
  Speaker 2: a long column of cartilage. So a perfectly normal shark
• 8:16
  Speaker 2: washes ashore looking remarkably like a plesiosaur, a long necked,
• 8:21
  Speaker 2: tiny headed sea monster.
• 8:23
  Speaker 1: And people walk the beach. They see this gelatinous rotting
• 8:25
  Speaker 1: mass and they scream dinosaur. We completely misinterpret natural decay
• 8:29
  Speaker 1: because the ocean warps the remains.
• 8:31
  Speaker 2: The ocean is a highly transformative environment. It disguises a
• 8:34
  Speaker 2: familiar fast.
• 8:35
  Speaker 1: Forward to modern day. You would think we are past
• 8:37
  Speaker 1: this in the twenty twenties, but there is a massive
• 8:40
  Speaker 1: explosion of viral TikTok and YouTube videos right.
• 8:43
  Speaker 2: Now the mermaid core trend.
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: Yes, deep sea fishermen claiming to capture mermaids on camera,
• 8:49
  Speaker 1: figures leaping from the waves in Cornwall, screaming creatures chasing
• 8:53
  Speaker 1: boats in the Caribbean.
• 8:55
  Speaker 2: From a sociological standpoint, the virality is fascinating. We still
• 8:58
  Speaker 2: want to believe, we really do. But from a scientific one,
• 9:01
  Speaker 2: these modern sightings rely on a new type of distortion,
• 9:05
  Speaker 2: artificial intelligence.
• 9:07
  Speaker 1: Right when you run frame by frame analyzes on these
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: viral videos, the AI artifacts are just glaring.
• 9:14
  Speaker 2: They really are.
• 9:15
  Speaker 1: What kind of artifacts give it away for you?
• 9:16
  Speaker 2: Oh, morphing teeth, inconsistent light sourcing, hydrodynamics that completely defy physics,
• 9:23
  Speaker 2: like water reacting improperly to the movement of the alleged creature.
• 9:27
  Speaker 2: It is pure digital fabrication.
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: It's the modern equivalent of the infamous three hundred year
• 9:32
  Speaker 1: old Japanese mermaid money. They finally ran CT scans and
• 9:36
  Speaker 1: DNA tests on that relic.
• 9:38
  Speaker 2: Recently, right, they did, and for centuries it was an
• 9:40
  Speaker 2: object of reverence, but modern analysis proved it was just
• 9:43
  Speaker 2: a remarkably crafted hax.
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: What was it actually made of.
• 9:46
  Speaker 2: Fish parts, cloth, paper, and animal hair meticulously stitched together.
• 9:50
  Speaker 2: But the allure of the unknown remains powerful. You know,
• 9:54
  Speaker 2: we have mapped less than twenty percent of the ocean
• 9:57
  Speaker 2: floor in.
• 9:57
  Speaker 1: High resolution, less than twenty percent wild.
• 10:00
  Speaker 2: So we look at that terrifying void and we instinctively
• 10:04
  Speaker 2: populate it with our fears.
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: We project into the shadows. But here is where it
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: gets really compelling. For it, we do not need to
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: invent Ai mermaids. The physical reality of the ocean is
• 10:16
  Speaker 1: strange enough.
• 10:17
  Speaker 2: On itself out without a debt.
• 10:19
  Speaker 1: The genuine anomalies are wild. Let's run through some of
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: these physical mystery. The Uniguni monument off the coast of
• 10:26
  Speaker 1: Japan blew my mind.
• 10:27
  Speaker 2: That one is heavily debated.
• 10:29
  Speaker 1: You look at the underwater foot wage. It looks like
• 10:31
  Speaker 1: perfectly carved terraces, stone steps, submerged pyramid. Right.
• 10:34
  Speaker 2: The geological debate there is fierce. One camp argues these
• 10:37
  Speaker 2: are just natural sandstone fractures, natural, they look so straight. Well,
• 10:41
  Speaker 2: the rock bed is prone to breaking along straight fault
• 10:44
  Speaker 2: lines due to regional tectonic shear. But the opposing camp
• 10:48
  Speaker 2: argues the angles are just too precise, suggesting ancient terraforming
• 10:52
  Speaker 2: from a sunken preglacial civilization.
• 10:54
  Speaker 1: Then there is the Baltic Sea anomaly. Sonar picked up
• 10:58
  Speaker 1: this massive circular object with strange structural lines on the seafloor.
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: I mean it looks exactly like the millennium falcon.
• 11:05
  Speaker 2: It really does have that distinct shape.
• 11:08
  Speaker 1: Some geologists claim it is just a glacial deposit, an
• 11:11
  Speaker 1: erratic rock dropped by melting ice thousands of years ago,
• 11:15
  Speaker 1: but expedition divers report their electrical equipment and satellite phones
• 11:19
  Speaker 1: cut out the moment they float directly over it.
• 11:21
  Speaker 2: True, but we must remember the limitations of remote sensing.
• 11:25
  Speaker 2: Sonar translates acoustic echoes into visual shape. Right, It's not
• 11:28
  Speaker 2: a photograph exactly. It is an interpretation of density, not
• 11:32
  Speaker 2: a high definition image. It leaves immense room for peridolia,
• 11:36
  Speaker 2: the human tendency to see meaningful patterns like space ships
• 11:40
  Speaker 2: in completely random data.
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: But the biology is just as inexplicable, like the Milky Sea.
• 11:45
  Speaker 2: Phenomena bioluminescence operating on a macro ecological scale.
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: It's beautiful, trillions of bioluminescent bacteria glowing simultaneously. They gather
• 11:54
  Speaker 1: in such massive aggregates that these glowing white patches of
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: ocean can literally be seen from space satellites.
• 12:01
  Speaker 2: We have a satellite imagery confirming it.
• 12:03
  Speaker 1: But why do they synchronize? I mean, how do trillions
• 12:05
  Speaker 1: of bacteria coordinate? That?
• 12:07
  Speaker 2: It is driven by a mechanism called quorum sensing. Bacteria
• 12:10
  Speaker 2: like vibrioharvia release these chemical signaling molecules into the water. Okay,
• 12:15
  Speaker 2: when the population density reaches a critical threshold, the concentration
• 12:19
  Speaker 2: of these molecules triggers a collective genetic response. They all
• 12:23
  Speaker 2: turn on their light producing enzymes at the exact same moment.
• 12:26
  Speaker 1: That is incredible.
• 12:28
  Speaker 2: But why well, the evolutionary advantage of creating a glowing
• 12:31
  Speaker 2: patch of ocean the size of Iceland is still fiercely debated.
• 12:35
  Speaker 2: We don't have a definitive answer.
• 12:37
  Speaker 1: And consider the immortal jellyfish turtops Is dorny.
• 12:40
  Speaker 2: A total masterclass in cellular manipulation.
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: When this jellyfish is physically damaged or starving, it does
• 12:47
  Speaker 1: not die. It drops to the seafloor, folds in on itself,
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: and reverts back to its earliest larval stage apollup.
• 12:55
  Speaker 2: The mechanism is called transdifferentiation.
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: How does that work?
• 12:59
  Speaker 2: An adult cell, like a specialized muscle or nerve cell,
• 13:02
  Speaker 2: completely alters its genetic expression. It basically resets its epigenetic
• 13:06
  Speaker 2: markers and transforms back into an unspecialized stem cell. It
• 13:11
  Speaker 2: then rebuilds a completely new young body.
• 13:14
  Speaker 1: It ages backward. It literally hits the reset button on
• 13:17
  Speaker 1: its own biological clock. But while these visual and biological
• 13:21
  Speaker 1: mysteries are captivating, the most profound anomalies bring us right.
• 13:25
  Speaker 2: Back to sound, Always back to sound.
• 13:27
  Speaker 1: The bloop was solved, but NAA's acoustic archives are full
• 13:32
  Speaker 1: of lingering ghosts.
• 13:33
  Speaker 2: Yeah, there are several signals that completely defy classification. Take
• 13:37
  Speaker 2: the upsweep?
• 13:38
  Speaker 1: What's the upsweep?
• 13:39
  Speaker 2: It consists of a long train of narrow band upsweeping sounds.
• 13:43
  Speaker 2: It was detected near New Zealand. Interestingly, it is seasonal.
• 13:47
  Speaker 2: It peaks in the spring and fall.
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: Wait, what makes it sound seasonal?
• 13:50
  Speaker 2: That is the mystery. Some accustations propose it relates to
• 13:54
  Speaker 2: cyclic volcanic activity or seasonal changes in hydrothermal venting, but
• 13:58
  Speaker 2: no definitive source has ever lost.
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: Then there is Julia, recorded in nineteen ninety nine. It
• 14:04
  Speaker 1: lasted roughly fifteen seconds. We listen to the tape and
• 14:07
  Speaker 1: it sounds like a massive, eerie moan echoing through the.
• 14:10
  Speaker 2: Pacific, followed closely by slowdown, a sound recorded the same
• 14:14
  Speaker 2: year as the blue one decelerates right, Yes, it steadily
• 14:18
  Speaker 2: decelerates in frequency over the course of several minutes. It
• 14:21
  Speaker 2: shares acoustic characteristics with friction, like a massive sheet of
• 14:25
  Speaker 2: ice dragging across land. But again the point of origin
• 14:29
  Speaker 2: remains completely unconfirmed.
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: We are constantly finding new things in that dark void.
• 14:34
  Speaker 1: Look at the twenty twenty five discovery off the coast
• 14:37
  Speaker 1: of Gualm deep in the twilight.
• 14:38
  Speaker 2: Zone, the mesopelagic zone. Sunlight barely penetrates down there. Photosynthesis
• 14:44
  Speaker 2: is impossible.
• 14:45
  Speaker 1: Scientists placed autonomous reath monitoring structures down there, arms plates.
• 14:50
  Speaker 2: They're essentially layered underwater.
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: Hotel right left on the sea floor from marine life
• 14:55
  Speaker 1: to colonize. They left them in the twilight zone, and
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: when they retrieved them, they just over twenty entirely new
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: species living inside tiny bizarre life forms, thriving in near
• 15:05
  Speaker 1: freezing darkness.
• 15:06
  Speaker 2: It really demonstrates our profound ignorance of deep sea biodiversity.
• 15:10
  Speaker 2: We haven't even cataloged the inhabitants.
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: But there's a flip side to this there is.
• 15:14
  Speaker 2: It highlights a tragic reality. We are discovering these delicate
• 15:17
  Speaker 2: ecosystems at the exact moment we are destroying them. Our
• 15:20
  Speaker 2: footprint precedes our understanding.
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: We are contaminating the ocean with noise, which brings us
• 15:26
  Speaker 1: to a shocking recent breakthrough to the a forty four.
• 15:30
  Speaker 2: Year ping a defining marker of the amphibasy.
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: For forty four years, scientists tracked this rhythmic eerie pinging
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: at the bottom of the Pacific. It drove researchers crazy.
• 15:41
  Speaker 1: Was it a new species, was it a classified military drone?
• 15:45
  Speaker 2: And what do they find?
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: My research revealed it was traced to the Clarion Clipperton Zone.
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: It was an acoustic ghost. The sound emanated from deep
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: sea mining scars left on the sea floor decades prior.
• 15:57
  Speaker 2: Right when industrial equipment gouges the seabed, it significantly alters
• 16:01
  Speaker 2: the fluid dynamics of.
• 16:02
  Speaker 1: The area because of the trenches.
• 16:04
  Speaker 2: Exactly deep ocean currents flow over these unnatural trenches. The
• 16:08
  Speaker 2: physical alteration creates eddy currents. These tiny whirlpools spin and collapse,
• 16:12
  Speaker 2: creating a resonant acoustic thing.
• 16:14
  Speaker 1: Okay, that's so eerie.
• 16:15
  Speaker 2: The physical scar generated a sonic imprint echoing.
• 16:18
  Speaker 1: For nearly half a century, human industry has completely hijacked
• 16:21
  Speaker 1: the ocean's acoustics.
• 16:22
  Speaker 2: We are fundamentally altering the baseline soundscapes of the entire planet,
• 16:27
  Speaker 2: and the scale of the intrusion is devastated.
• 16:29
  Speaker 1: Let's talk about the wall of sound we are creating.
• 16:31
  Speaker 1: Starting with shipping lengths.
• 16:33
  Speaker 2: Commercial cargo vessels emit constant low frequency cavitation noise from
• 16:38
  Speaker 2: their massive propellers. This noise sits right between ten herts
• 16:42
  Speaker 2: and one killerhertz.
• 16:43
  Speaker 1: Why is that specific frequency range such a big.
• 16:46
  Speaker 2: Problem because it perfectly overlaps with the vocal range of
• 16:50
  Speaker 2: balen whales, blue whales fin whales. They rely on low
• 16:55
  Speaker 2: frequency songs to find mates across entire ocean basins. Shipping
• 17:00
  Speaker 2: lanes create an acoustic fog. The whales literally cannot hear
• 17:04
  Speaker 2: each other over the rumble of global commerce. It is
• 17:07
  Speaker 2: called acoustic masking.
• 17:08
  Speaker 1: We are drowning them out. And that is just the
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: constant hump. What about military sonar?
• 17:13
  Speaker 2: Mid frequency active sonar is episodic but violently intense. Naval
• 17:17
  Speaker 2: vessels blast sound waves to map objects.
• 17:20
  Speaker 1: And how does that affect the animals.
• 17:21
  Speaker 2: These acoustic pulses cause profound behavioral panic and deep living
• 17:25
  Speaker 2: mammals like beaked whales, the animal's surface far too rapidly
• 17:28
  Speaker 2: to escape the noise, resulting in decompression.
• 17:31
  Speaker 1: Sickness like the bends for scuba.
• 17:33
  Speaker 2: Divers, precisely, their blood literally bubbles.
• 17:35
  Speaker 1: That's horrifying. And then you have the seismic surveys for
• 17:38
  Speaker 1: oil and gas. They tow these massive air guns behind ships.
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: They blast pressurized air into the seabed at up to
• 17:46
  Speaker 1: two hundred and forty decibels. It's definite. They fire every
• 17:49
  Speaker 1: ten seconds, twenty four hours a day for weeks.
• 17:52
  Speaker 2: It completely shatters the acoustic environment. It disrupts feeding, It
• 17:55
  Speaker 2: fragments pods.
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: Imagine standing in a pitch black room. You are completely blind,
• 18:00
  Speaker 1: You rely entirely on your hearing. You are trying to
• 18:03
  Speaker 1: whisper vital survival information to your friend across the room.
• 18:06
  Speaker 1: Right suddenly, someone walks in and blasts an airhorn next
• 18:10
  Speaker 1: to your ear over and over while slashing a strobe light.
• 18:13
  Speaker 1: You would lose your mind, you would panic, you couldn't function.
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: That is the daily reality for marine life navigating our oceans.
• 18:21
  Speaker 2: The analogy captures the sensory deprivation perfectly. Sound is their
• 18:24
  Speaker 2: primary modality. It dictates foraging, navigation, reproduction. We're literally blinding
• 18:30
  Speaker 2: them with noise.
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: Face. With this barrage of human industry and natural predators,
• 18:35
  Speaker 1: the animals are forced to adapt. Marine life is actively
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: changing how they speak to survive.
• 18:40
  Speaker 2: The behavioral plasticity is remarkable though. A prime example involves
• 18:44
  Speaker 2: the North Atlantic right whales?
• 18:46
  Speaker 1: What are they doing differently?
• 18:47
  Speaker 2: Right whales migrate off the coast of Florida and Georgia
• 18:50
  Speaker 2: to calve and shallow waters. Historically, they use loud upcalling
• 18:54
  Speaker 2: vocalizations to maintain contact with.
• 18:56
  Speaker 1: Their young, to keep track of the babies.
• 18:58
  Speaker 2: Right but Bioaccustition noticed a sudden shift. To avoid killer whales,
• 19:03
  Speaker 2: white sharks, and to cope with the overwhelming din of
• 19:06
  Speaker 2: shipping traffic, the mothers and calves stopped singing.
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: Wait, they just went silent.
• 19:11
  Speaker 2: They developed a technique known as acoustic crypsis.
• 19:14
  Speaker 1: They whisper whales whisper.
• 19:16
  Speaker 2: They reduced the amplitude of their calls, emitting these soft
• 19:19
  Speaker 2: guttural grunts. These heavily modified signals only travel a few meters.
• 19:25
  Speaker 2: They sacrifice long range communication to establish a localized hidden channel.
• 19:30
  Speaker 2: They hide in the acoustic shadows.
• 19:33
  Speaker 1: It is incredibly smart, but it's entirely heartbreaking. They're forced
• 19:36
  Speaker 1: to whisper in the dark just to survive our presence.
• 19:39
  Speaker 1: But not all whales are quieting down. I was researching
• 19:42
  Speaker 1: bowhead whales in the Arctic. They are taking the exact
• 19:45
  Speaker 1: opposite approach.
• 19:46
  Speaker 2: Bowhead vocalizations are unparalleled in their complexity.
• 19:49
  Speaker 1: We all know humpback whales. Humpbacks are the classical opera
• 19:53
  Speaker 1: singers of the sea, grand sweeping, highly structured, repetitive melodies,
• 19:58
  Speaker 1: But bowheadsha are the jazz musicians.
• 20:01
  Speaker 2: The combinatorial diversity of their song is just staggering.
• 20:04
  Speaker 1: They improvise, They sing multiple harmonically unrelated songs simultaneously. Their
• 20:10
  Speaker 1: songs never stay the same. They evolve season to season,
• 20:13
  Speaker 1: year to year.
• 20:14
  Speaker 2: It's constantly shifting.
• 20:15
  Speaker 1: A pod might invent an entirely new acoustic repertoire over
• 20:18
  Speaker 1: just a few months.
• 20:20
  Speaker 2: It is a profound form of cultural transmission, and eucologists
• 20:23
  Speaker 2: utilize this diversity as a live metric. How So, the
• 20:26
  Speaker 2: complexity of the song serves as an acoustic indicator of
• 20:29
  Speaker 2: population health. A genetically diverse thriving pod produces intricate, evolving jazz.
• 20:35
  Speaker 2: A stressed or dwindling pod produces a simplified soundscape.
• 20:39
  Speaker 1: If you are learning something new about these hidden languages,
• 20:42
  Speaker 1: take a moment to drop a five star rating for
• 20:44
  Speaker 1: Beyond Infographics. Your support helps us dive into these secret worlds.
• 20:48
  Speaker 2: Expanding our perspective beyond the ocean reveals that this acoustic
• 20:52
  Speaker 2: intelligence permeates the entire terrestrial globe as well.
• 20:55
  Speaker 1: The whole planet is vibrating.
• 20:57
  Speaker 2: And technology is finally allowing us to ease.
• 21:00
  Speaker 1: Drop on it. How are we suddenly hearing all of this?
• 21:03
  Speaker 1: What changed the.
• 21:04
  Speaker 2: Emergence of digital bioacoustics. Think of it as a planetary scale.
• 21:09
  Speaker 1: Prosthetic here, a prosthetic here.
• 21:11
  Speaker 2: Like that, human hearing is biologically constrained. We perceive sound
• 21:16
  Speaker 2: waves between twenty hurts and twenty kiloherts. For most of
• 21:19
  Speaker 2: our history, anything outside that narrow window was classified as silence.
• 21:24
  Speaker 1: It is just human arrogance. Really, if we can't hear it,
• 21:27
  Speaker 1: it obviously isn't happening.
• 21:28
  Speaker 2: We assumed the world was quiet. Now we deploy autonomous,
• 21:32
  Speaker 2: miniaturized digital microphones across remote ecosystems. They record continuously capturing
• 21:38
  Speaker 2: infrasound well below our threshold and ultrasound well above it.
• 21:42
  Speaker 1: We are revealing an invisible layer of communication.
• 21:45
  Speaker 2: Exactly.
• 21:45
  Speaker 1: This brings me to one of my absolute favorite discoveries
• 21:48
  Speaker 1: in the research. Katie Paine back in the nineteen.
• 21:50
  Speaker 2: Eighties, Oh, a total pioneer in acoustic biology.
• 21:53
  Speaker 1: Yeah, she was observing the African elephant population, poaching was
• 21:57
  Speaker 1: just decimating them at the time, right and ending near
• 22:00
  Speaker 1: a concrete wall at a zoo, just watching the elephants,
• 22:04
  Speaker 1: and she noticed this strange throbbing sensation.
• 22:07
  Speaker 2: In the air, physical vibration exactly.
• 22:09
  Speaker 1: She heard absolutely nothing, but she felt it rattling her chest.
• 22:12
  Speaker 2: Cavity because she was experiencing a low frequency pressure wave,
• 22:17
  Speaker 2: a Railey wave moving through the ground in the air.
• 22:19
  Speaker 1: So she realizes something is happening. She gets recording equipment,
• 22:23
  Speaker 1: sets it up near the elephants and captures the tape.
• 22:26
  Speaker 1: Then she takes the tapes to a lab and speeds
• 22:28
  Speaker 1: them up, compressing the long slow wavelengths into the human
• 22:32
  Speaker 1: hearing range.
• 22:33
  Speaker 2: And what does she hear.
• 22:34
  Speaker 1: She discovers that elephants are having massive, complex constant conversations
• 22:39
  Speaker 1: using deep.
• 22:40
  Speaker 2: Infrasound frequencies around fourteen to sixteen hrtz. These low frequency
• 22:44
  Speaker 2: waves are incredibly robust. They passed straight through dense vegetation,
• 22:49
  Speaker 2: concrete walls, and miles of earth without scattering.
• 22:53
  Speaker 1: They coordinate movements across miles of savannah without making a
• 22:56
  Speaker 1: single audible sound to a human standing right next to them.
• 22:59
  Speaker 1: It's amazing.
• 23:00
  Speaker 2: It is shifting to the extreme opposite end of the spectrum.
• 23:03
  Speaker 2: The ultra high frequencies we uncover equally profound biological engineering.
• 23:09
  Speaker 2: Take the work of Donald Griffin in nineteen thirty nine,
• 23:12
  Speaker 2: the bat echolocation discovery. Yes, Griffin was an undergraduate at Harvard.
• 23:17
  Speaker 2: He hypothesized that bats navigate in total darkness by emitting
• 23:21
  Speaker 2: high frequency ultrasonic clicks. They listened to the echoes bouncing
• 23:25
  Speaker 2: off insects to map their environment in real time.
• 23:28
  Speaker 1: But he couldn't prove it.
• 23:29
  Speaker 2: Could He Verifying this required technology that didn't widely exist yet,
• 23:34
  Speaker 2: so he collaborated with a physics professor named George Washington Pierce.
• 23:38
  Speaker 1: Piers built a machine to listen to bugs right.
• 23:40
  Speaker 2: Pierce had constructed a supersonic receiver in his basement. He
• 23:43
  Speaker 2: originally designed it to study the high frequency stridulation of
• 23:47
  Speaker 2: crickets the chirping sound. By aiming this device at crickets,
• 23:51
  Speaker 2: Pierce discovered a mathematical relationship between biology and the environment.
• 23:55
  Speaker 2: Crickets are biological thermometers.
• 23:57
  Speaker 1: Wait, how does an insects measure the temperature through the.
• 23:59
  Speaker 2: Art peneous equation. The metabolic rate of a cold blooded
• 24:03
  Speaker 2: insect is directly dictated by ambient temperature. As the air warms,
• 24:08
  Speaker 2: the chemical reactions powering their muscles speed up.
• 24:11
  Speaker 1: Oh, that makes sense.
• 24:12
  Speaker 2: Pierce proved that a cricket's chirp rate changes with exact,
• 24:15
  Speaker 2: predictable precision based on the heat.
• 24:18
  Speaker 1: The hotter it is, the faster they chirp.
• 24:20
  Speaker 2: The snowy tree cricket is the famous example. Count the
• 24:23
  Speaker 2: number of chirps in fourteen seconds, add forty and you
• 24:26
  Speaker 2: have the exact temperature in fairnheit.
• 24:28
  Speaker 1: That is so cool.
• 24:29
  Speaker 2: The soundscape is a literal acoustic readout of the physical environment.
• 24:33
  Speaker 1: So what does this all mean? We can use this
• 24:36
  Speaker 1: technology to hear the damage redoing. We hear the silencing
• 24:39
  Speaker 1: of the whales, we hear the mechanical ghosts of mining.
• 24:42
  Speaker 1: Can we use sound to actually heal the planet.
• 24:45
  Speaker 2: We are entering? The era of acoustic enrichment using sound
• 24:48
  Speaker 2: as an ecological tool.
• 24:49
  Speaker 1: I found this uplifting research by Tim Gordon at the
• 24:52
  Speaker 1: Great Barrier read. When a coral reef experiences a marine
• 24:56
  Speaker 1: heat wave, the coral expels its symbiotic alogy, bleaches, it dies, And.
• 25:01
  Speaker 2: When a reef dies, it goes completely silent. The popping
• 25:05
  Speaker 2: of pistol shrimp, the scraping of parrotfish, the vibrant noise
• 25:09
  Speaker 2: of life vanishes.
• 25:11
  Speaker 1: This creates a devastating feedback loop, doesn't it?
• 25:13
  Speaker 2: It does. Marine larva, babyfish, and coral polyps drifting in
• 25:17
  Speaker 2: the open ocean rely heavily on acoustic cues. They listened
• 25:21
  Speaker 2: for the crackle of a healthy reef to nowhere to settle.
• 25:24
  Speaker 2: A silent reef offers no acoustic beacon, so.
• 25:27
  Speaker 1: The fish abandon it. It stays dead. But Gordon tried
• 25:31
  Speaker 1: an experiment. He went to a highly degraded dead patch
• 25:34
  Speaker 1: of coral rubble. He set up underwater loudspeakers right in
• 25:38
  Speaker 1: the middle of the graveyard.
• 25:39
  Speaker 2: He introduced artificial acoustic scaffolding.
• 25:42
  Speaker 1: He played back hydrophone recordings of that exact read from
• 25:45
  Speaker 1: years prior, back when he was healthy and vibrant He
• 25:48
  Speaker 1: blasted the ghosts of the living reef into the water
• 25:50
  Speaker 1: at night.
• 25:50
  Speaker 2: And the biological response was immediate.
• 25:52
  Speaker 1: The fish came back. The larva heard the ghost of
• 25:55
  Speaker 1: the healthy reef. They swam toward the speakers, and they settled,
• 25:59
  Speaker 1: and they stayed.
• 26:00
  Speaker 2: The community actually began to rebuild.
• 26:02
  Speaker 1: The physical presence of the fish brought nutrients back to
• 26:05
  Speaker 1: the coral rubble. The reef actually began to regenerate. It
• 26:08
  Speaker 1: was a self fulfilling prophecy. We can use sound to
• 26:12
  Speaker 1: literally breathe life back into a dead ecosystem.
• 26:15
  Speaker 2: It fundamentally proves that sound is not merely a byproduct
• 26:19
  Speaker 2: of biological activity. Sound organizes the ecosystem. It is the
• 26:23
  Speaker 2: architectural framework of.
• 26:25
  Speaker 1: Life which brings us to the absolute edge of acoustic intelligence.
• 26:29
  Speaker 1: The plant Kingdom.
• 26:30
  Speaker 2: Plants operate on a surprisingly complex acoustic plane.
• 26:34
  Speaker 1: We think of plants as static, silent objects, not at all.
• 26:39
  Speaker 1: I looked into a Microsoft's Project Florence. They developed a
• 26:42
  Speaker 1: biodigital interface. It translates a plant's electrochemical responses into actual text.
• 26:47
  Speaker 2: Right you tape a positive or negative sentiment on a computer,
• 26:50
  Speaker 2: the machine translates that into specific frequencies of red or
• 26:53
  Speaker 2: blue light directed.
• 26:55
  Speaker 1: At the plant, and the plant reacts to the light.
• 26:57
  Speaker 1: Stress sensors monitor the shifts in the plant's hydration, temperature,
• 27:00
  Speaker 1: and chemical.
• 27:01
  Speaker 2: Output in real time, and the algorithm translates those chemical
• 27:04
  Speaker 2: shifts back into an English text message on your phone.
• 27:07
  Speaker 1: It is wild, but plants do not need Microsoft to speak.
• 27:11
  Speaker 1: They vocalize in the wild. When a plant experiences extreme
• 27:15
  Speaker 1: drought or severe physical stress, it physically emits high frequency
• 27:19
  Speaker 1: ultrasonic clicks.
• 27:20
  Speaker 2: It is vital to understand the mechanism here, though it
• 27:23
  Speaker 2: is not a vocal core. It is a process called cavitation.
• 27:26
  Speaker 1: How does that work?
• 27:27
  Speaker 2: Plants pull water up from their roots through tubes called xylum.
• 27:31
  Speaker 2: This relies on the cohesion tension theory. The evaporation at
• 27:35
  Speaker 2: the leaves creates immense negative pressure, pulling the water column up.
• 27:39
  Speaker 2: During a severe drought, that tension becomes too.
• 27:41
  Speaker 1: Great, the plumbing basically breaks.
• 27:43
  Speaker 2: Exactly, the water column snacks and air bubble instantly forms
• 27:47
  Speaker 2: and collapses. The snapping of that microscopic water column generates
• 27:51
  Speaker 2: an acoustic shockwave and an ultrasonic click.
• 27:54
  Speaker 1: Wow.
• 27:54
  Speaker 2: The plant is mechanically crying out as its vascular system fractures.
• 27:58
  Speaker 1: They literally pop when they're thirst and flowers. This detail
• 28:01
  Speaker 1: completely floored me. Flowers act as acoustic antennae. A flower
• 28:06
  Speaker 1: can physically detect the specific buzz of it approaching bee's wings.
• 28:09
  Speaker 2: The mcanner receptors and the petals vibrate at that exact frequency.
• 28:13
  Speaker 1: The moment the flower hears the bee, it floods its
• 28:16
  Speaker 1: own nectar with a higher concentration of sugar. It prepares
• 28:19
  Speaker 1: a sweeter meal in real time to secure pollination.
• 28:22
  Speaker 2: Phytoacoustics, plants perceive acoustic vibrations and alter their internal biochemistry
• 28:27
  Speaker 2: in minutes to maximize their evolutionary success.
• 28:30
  Speaker 1: I have to raise a vital ethical question here, Yeah,
• 28:33
  Speaker 1: because reading all of this it feels like we're walking
• 28:35
  Speaker 1: a dangerous tightrope. It's one thing to passively listen to
• 28:39
  Speaker 1: the earth, to put microphones in the jungle to monitor elephants, right,
• 28:43
  Speaker 1: But when we actively broadcast sounds to trick fish into
• 28:47
  Speaker 1: settling on dead coral or hook potted plants up to
• 28:50
  Speaker 1: algorithms that they can text us, are we crossing a line?
• 28:53
  Speaker 1: Are we genuinely connecting with nature or are we just
• 28:56
  Speaker 1: using technology to domesticate it.
• 28:58
  Speaker 2: You are identifying the core tension between acoustic stewardship and
• 29:01
  Speaker 2: acoustic terraforming. Acoustic enrichment works, but playing a recording of
• 29:06
  Speaker 2: a healthy reef does not lower the ocean temperature.
• 29:09
  Speaker 1: It treats a symptom, not the disease.
• 29:11
  Speaker 2: Of climate change. And regarding plants, translating chemical stress into
• 29:16
  Speaker 2: an English text message is anthropomorphism. It satisfies the human
• 29:21
  Speaker 2: desire for conversation, but it forces an organism that experiences
• 29:25
  Speaker 2: the universe via chemistry and light to conform to human syntax.
• 29:30
  Speaker 1: We desperately want to hear them, but we demand they.
• 29:33
  Speaker 2: Speak our language exactly. The ultimate goal of bioacoustics shouldn't
• 29:37
  Speaker 2: be to turn nature into an interactive digital pet. The
• 29:40
  Speaker 2: goal is to understand their language on their terms, to
• 29:44
  Speaker 2: recognize their agency without humanizing them.
• 29:47
  Speaker 1: Let's bring this massive journey together. We started in the
• 29:50
  Speaker 1: crushing depths of the Pacific, listening to the roaring friction
• 29:54
  Speaker 1: of galacial ice quakes. We weeded through the psychological monsters,
• 29:57
  Speaker 1: we invent mermaids and decompose globsters. We confronted the forty
• 30:02
  Speaker 1: four year mechanical pings of our own deep sea mining.
• 30:05
  Speaker 2: Scars and the noise pollution we create.
• 30:07
  Speaker 1: And finally we tuned our prosthetic ears to hear right
• 30:09
  Speaker 1: whales whispering in the dark, elephants rumbling through the earth,
• 30:13
  Speaker 1: and the ultrasonic clicks of thirsty plants.
• 30:16
  Speaker 2: It really forces a total paradigm shift. The world is
• 30:20
  Speaker 2: not a silent backdrop. It is a vibrating, data rich network.
• 30:25
  Speaker 1: The next time you walk outside or stand by the ocean,
• 30:27
  Speaker 1: remember that the environment around you is actively speaking. It
• 30:31
  Speaker 1: is engaged in a massive, ancient, and ongoing conversation. You
• 30:35
  Speaker 1: just have to know how to tune your frequency.
• 30:37
  Speaker 2: The symphony is playing, We just have to choose to listen.
• 30:40
  Speaker 1: I want to leave you with this final idea to
• 30:42
  Speaker 1: ponder if every single species on Earth, from a microscopic
• 30:47
  Speaker 1: coral larva following a soundscape to a massive oak tree
• 30:50
  Speaker 1: reacting to vibrations, has a unique acoustic signature, what does
• 30:55
  Speaker 1: humanity's acoustic signature actually say about us?
• 30:58
  Speaker 2: That is a chilling thought.
• 31:00
  Speaker 1: Now, more importantly, what will the Earth sound like when
• 31:02
  Speaker 1: we finally learn to quiet down?
• 31:03
  Speaker 2: That is the defining question of our era.
• 31:05
  Speaker 1: Thank you for joining us on this edition Beyond Infographics.
• 31:08
  Speaker 1: Until next time, remember the pitch black ocean, the crushing pressure,
• 31:12
  Speaker 1: and the sounds waiting in the dark. Keep listening.