This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

Summer is normally cruise ship season in southeast Alaska.

Every year around this time, these floating behemists filled with tourists sail up the inside passage,

stopping at little coastal port towns like Sitka and Ketchikan.

One of the popular destinations along the route is Glacier Bay. It's this spectacular bay. It's full of glaciers, hence the name, and icebirds and sea otters and lots of humpback whales.

The National Park Service regulates how many cruise ships can come in and out of the bay

and how close they can get to the whales. But still, the humpbacks that are there in the summer

have to live alongside roaring boat engines. Oh, no, no. I'm going to. What we know is that animals change their behavior when the ocean gets noisy.

Michelle Forne is an acoustic ecologist at Cornell.

Every summer she travels to Glacier Bay to drop a hydrophone in the water, listening on what the

whales are saying, and study how it's being affected by ship noise.

This year, Michelle was preparing for her annual trip to Alaska when the COVID-19 shutdowns were announced.

So Friday the 13th was the last day that we were allowed to be in the lab at work

before we had to start sheltering in place.

And what that also meant from my perspective

was that my summer field season was canceled.

That the trip to Alaska that I was meant to take

to go and do work with these animals wasn't going to happen.

The lab at Cornell would also need to close, and so all the scientists gather together for a

final in-person meeting to try to plan out how everyone was going to keep their research going from home.

And Michelle mentioned that the summer crew season would probably not even happen this year in Alaska.

At which point another person at the meeting broke in with a question.

...