The ocean is normally a fairly noisy place, with the sounds of happy dolphins, lonely whales and diesel-chugging ships saturating the undersea world. But climate change may turn up the volume on this liquid symphony as warmer sea temperatures boost the volume of noise produced by the small but incredibly loud percussionist in this orchestra: the snapping shrimp.
This crustacean uses its oversize claw as a bubble-forming pistol of sorts, snapping it at more than 210 decibels. That’s louder than a gunshot, which is only 150 decibels. The shrimp uses these bubbles as a kind of sonic weapon to knock out its prey.
Now, marine scientists have discovered that warmer temperatures make snapping shrimp snap faster and louder, causing potential interference for submarines, fishermen, and marine life that need to communicate nearby. “It’s like going to a regular party and then someone turns up the music and the party goes wild,” says Aran Mooney, an associate scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution who presented his work at the American Geophysical Union conference this month.That matters, because a loud party in an undersea neighborhood disrupts life for everyone else who lives there. Mooney says fish also use sound to defend territory and to mate, so a noisier habitat could mean lower reproductive rates for some marine species. “An increase in sound could affect their neighbors as well as marine animals who rely on sound,” Mooney says. “If you increase background noise, you disrupt communication from them.”
To be sure, this is just one experiment involving one kind of marine animal. But globally, the past 10 years have been the warmest on record for Earth’s oceans. As heat is absorbed from the atmosphere, it doesn’t spread out evenly. There are hot spots of above-average heating off the northeastern US and South America, while the waters below Greenland are colder than usual. Heat from the atmosphere also goes to melting ice shelves, evaporating water, or directly reheating the atmosphere, according to a recent report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).All told, the world’s oceans have absorbed more than 90 percent of the heat trapped by greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, and are warming 40 percent faster than a United Nations panel of scientists predicted they would just five years ago.So it’s not just creatures in the tropics that are feeling the effects of a warming—and louder—ocean. So, too, are Arctic marine animals. When wind blows across open water, it creates bubbles and waves that in turn make noise. Arctic sea ice normally forms a protective layer against these environmental sounds, but ice coverage has declined dramatically as the result of atmospheric warming, creating bigger areas and longer periods of open water. Some areas of the Barents Sea now have four more months each year of open water than they did 30 years ago, says Kate Stafford, a senior oceanographer at the University of Washington’s Applied Physics Laboratory.
