This TED Talk features oceanographer Kate Stafford recorded live at TEDxern, 2016.

In 1956, a documentary by Jacques Cousteau won both the Pandor and an Oscar award.

This film was called Le Monde du Silence, or the Silent World.

And the premise of the title was that the underwater world was a quiet world.

We now know, 60 years later, that the underwater world was a quiet world. We now know, 60 years later,

that the underwater world is anything but silent.

Although the sounds are inaudible above water,

depending upon where you are and the time of year,

the underwater soundscape can be as noisy as any jungle or rainforest. Invertebrates like snapping

shrimp, fish, and marine mammals all use sound. They use sound to study their habitat, to keep

in communication with each other, to navigate, to detect predators and prey. And they also use sound

by listening to know something about their environment. Take for an example, the Arctic. It's

considered a vast, inhospitable place sometimes described as a desert because it is so cold and so remote and ice covered

for much of the year. And despite this, there is no place on earth that I would rather be than the Arctic,

especially as days lengthen and spring comes. And to me, the Arctic really embodies this disconnect between what we see

on the surface and what's going on underwater. You can look out across the ice, all white and blue

and cold, and see nothing. But if you could hear underwater, the sounds you would hear would

at first amaze and then delight you. And while your eyes are seeing nothing for kilometers

but ice, your ears are telling you that out there are bowhead and beluga whales, walrus, and bearded seals.

The ice too makes sounds. It screeches and cracks and pops and groans as it collides and rubs

when temperature or currents or winds change. And under 100% sea ice in the dead of winter,

bowhead whales are singing.

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