Climate change will significantly alter how sound travels underwater, potentially affecting natural soundscapes as well as accentuating human-generated noise, according to a new global study that identified future ocean"acoustic hotspots." These changes to ocean soundscapes could impact essential activities of marine life.
"The major impact is expected in the Arctic, where we know already there is amplification of the effects of climate change now. Not all the Arctic, but one specific part where all factors play together to give a signal that, according to the model predictions, overcomes the uncertainty of the model itself," said author Stefano Salon, a researcher at the National Institute of Oceanography and Applied Geophysics in Trieste, Italy.
Temperature, pressure with increasing depth and salinity all affect how fast and how far sound travels in water. In the new study, the researchers focused on hotspots where the climate signal stood out clearly from the model uncertainty and was larger than seasonal variability. "We chose to talk about one megafauna species, but many trophic levels in the ocean are affected by the soundscape or use sound," Affatati said."All these hotspots are locations of great biodiversity."
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