The long and loud calls of the whales reveal a structure beneath the ocean floor

Scientists investigating a seismic fault off the western coast of the United States have an unexpected new ally in their quest to create images of Earth’s crust in the deep ocean: fin whales.

Fin whales (Balaenoptera physalus) are gigantic between 20 and 25 meters (60 to 85 feet) long and can hear their songs as far as 1,000 kilometers (600 miles), and they thrive across the seas as loud as a ship’s engine. New research, published Thursday in the journal Science, found that the sound waves of these calls could help create images of the sea floor below the surface of the Earth up to 2.5 kilometers (1.6 miles).

Seafloor imaging, which is important for studying things like earthquake mechanics and carbon storage capacity, usually uses large airguns that send out blasts of sound down. The sound waves penetrate the crust and bounce back to the instruments on the sea floor, carrying information about the structures traveling through it. But such surveys are expensive, and the concussion noise of rifles may disturb marine mammals that use sound to communicate.

“It’s really cool to have another source of information,” says Vaclav Kona, co-author of the study, a seismologist at the Institute of Geophysics of the Czech Academy of Sciences.

Kona, who was then at Oregon State University, was studying earthquakes on the Blanco diversion fault off the coast of Oregon in 2012 and 2013 when he noticed strange readings on seismic instruments on the sea floor. The readings turned out to match the whale’s finned calls.

Whale sounds often appear in records of such instruments, says Emily Rowland, a marine seismologist at the University of Washington who was not involved in the study. Seismologists usually see these signals as a nuisance. But Kona noticed that some signals only appear on seafloor seismometers, which measure vibrations. The sound microphones did not pick up any corresponding sounds. This means that the signals weren’t coming directly from the whales, but rather they were echoes that bounce back from within the shell.

To use such signals for filming, Kona had to locate whales. This was possible because each whale call created two sets of waves: one that traveled directly to the earthquake station at the bottom of the ocean, and one that bounced between the ocean floor and ocean surface before reaching the same station. By comparing the arrival times of these two waves, Cosa can calculate the approximate locations of the whales.

Fin whales sing a loud one-second long. This pattern is good for seismic imaging because the pulses are easier to analyze than the constant noise, says William Wilcock of the University of Washington, a marine geophysicist who was not involved in the study but used seismic instruments to track whales. He noted that these whales are found almost everywhere except for the ice-covered parts of the Arctic – so “their calls can be used in many areas.”

Kona says this technology has limitations. Fin whale songs are of limited frequency, which means that the images underground are not as clear as those made with air cannons. In addition, the relatively flat sea floor is needed to triangulate whale sites and use their voices to analyze the data with only one seismic station; He adds that multiple stations are needed in sloping or hilly areas.

However, the proliferation of whale calls means they could provide new insight into ancient seismic datasets, Rowland says. More images of the first 2.5 kilometers of ocean sediments and crust can be used in areas including climatology (to better estimate the amount of carbon storage available in sediments) and seismology (to pinpoint the locations of earthquakes and determine how sediments and crust interact in rift zones).

“If we use whale songs at least as a complement to other sources of signals, they are free and always there,” says Kona. “It’s a win.”

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