Will the unicorns of the sea fall silent?

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 3 October 2023

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The term “narwhal” derives from the old Nordic for “nár + hvalr”, meaning corpse + whale, which, for these animals, is quickly becoming prophetic. Climate change, with its accompanying increase in human marine activity, has led to the Arctic Ocean becoming noisier. As narwhal rely on sound to communicate and navigate their surroundings, this could result in the extinction of populations like East Greenland's narwhal by as soon as 2025. Mary-Ann Ochota investigates how this issue is at once political, cultural, and environmental and speaks to the scientists, traditional hunters, and activists, who are seeking a solution.

Transcript

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0:00.0	The HappyPod is a special weekly episode from the Global News podcast bringing new positive stories
0:05.7	and uplifting interviews from around the world. Thousands of lives are being saved by bandages
0:10.5	that can stop heavy bleeding in less than a minute. There to save lives is great to go to bed
0:15.1	knowing that we can help. Listen now by searching for the Global News podcast from the BBC World Service
0:20.4	wherever you get your podcast.
0:28.7	This is a novel. It's a fantastical beast across between a large dolphin and a unicorn
0:36.9	with a giant spiral tusk jutting from the front of its head.
0:41.5	Nobles live in the freezing Arctic Ocean surrounding Canada, East Greenland, Russia and Norway.
0:47.2	There's is a world of sound. They make whistles, pulses, clicks, sometimes thousands
0:54.8	a second and sometimes as loud as a jet engine to navigate, communicate with one another and to
1:01.0	find food. But human activity and climate change are transforming the soundscape of the Arctic,
1:09.1	and many people believe these elusive unicorns of the sea might now be in peril.
1:14.1	I'm Mariano Hotter, and in this episode of the documentary from the BBC World Service,
1:21.2	I'm finding out how noise pollution is impacting the world's novels,
1:25.2	the indigenous people who live alongside them, and I'm exploring the tension between conservation
1:30.3	and commerce. I'm asking, will the unicorns of the sea fall silent?
1:35.8	The Arctic has always been a quiet place. They've been indigenous
1:43.5	in your people here for thousands of years, but in a time before motors and guns,
1:47.7	their activities didn't change the natural soundscape.
1:51.7	So they had, until recently, a really pristine environment, and that is changing now very rapidly,
1:59.2	too fast potentially for them to get used to it.
2:03.4	Susanna Blackwell studies the effect of underwater noise on marine mammals.
	...

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