This is a science

a 60 second science.

I'm Christopher Intagliata.

Got a minute?

My colleagues and I always joke that one of the Jacques Cousteau movies starts out

with something like, the ocean is a silent place and

the world of the silence you know it's anything but silent.

Kate Stafford is a biologist and oceanographer at the University of Washington

and she and her colleagues have been cataloging that soundscape of the deep,

like these bowhead whales and bearded seals.

They're using an array of underwater microphones near the Bering Strait,

a natural choke point for underwater traffic headed from the Pacific to the Arctic and back.

And in some ways, she says, listening is a better way to census the Arctic than seeing.

You can record sounds underwater at night in high winds when the region is ice covered.

So we're able to eavesdrop all year round.

And you can hear animals much further underwater than you could say see them from the surface of the water.

But in the last five years of underwater recording, Stafford says,

no two years have been the same in terms of which species they hear and when they hear them.

And as Arctic ice retreats, species like humpbacks and killer whales are staying north longer,

as late as early November, which she says wouldn't have been possible just a few decades ago.

They even found Humpback singing mating songs up in Arctic waters.

Which they used to think happened only down in tropical breeding grounds.

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