"Underwater, a carnival of sound is unfolding, with bowhead whales the featured act. Somewhere, a mother calls to her newborn calf, guiding her young along a route she's navigated dozens of times before. Several males compete for the season's final serenade, singing, as bowheads do, with two voices at once. There's a growl, a "gunshot," a burp, a series of upsweeps and downsweeps - the phonemics of a language only these whales can understand."
"The underwater acoustic landscape defines the life of Balaena mysticetus, the bowhead whale. Imagine swimming in frigid, pitch-black waters beneath the ice of a frozen sea, using echolocation as your guide. Alaska's bowheads migrate in the near-complete darkness of late winter and spring, traveling from their winter range in the Bering Sea to spend summer in the eastern Beaufort Sea, more than 1,500 miles away."
A line of pink lingers above the horizon as the April sun brightens the end of the polar night near Point Barrow. A dozen miles offshore the sea remains largely frozen, with inky tendrils of open water across the pack ice. Under the ice a complex acoustic world unfolds dominated by bowhead whales. Mothers call to newborn calves while males compete vocally, producing growls, gunshots, burps and sweeps, sometimes singing with two voices simultaneously. Bowheads migrate over 1,500 miles from the Bering Sea to the eastern Beaufort Sea and use sound to navigate, find food, locate breathing holes, and survive in thick ice.
Read at High Country News
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