Cell towers on the ocean floor

Bioluminescent Jelly by Chris Favero

A lot of folks have been sending me a spate recent articles under the title “Cell Towers on the Ocean Floor.” These bear a bit of excavation, because the industrialization of the ocean hinges on broadband underwater communication.

The proposal of basin-scale underwater communication was the issue that beckoned me into the field of marine bioacoustics in the early 1990s, when physical oceanographer Walter Munk, under the rubric of a “Sea Net” (marine internet) proposed the Acoustic Tomography of Ocean Climate (ATOC) program.

ATOC exploited the fact that variable seawater densities that were a product of salinity, pressure, and temperature, would allow sounds projected across ocean basins to be read much like sonograms allow the reading of variable tissue densities in the human body. And it was through this that ocean currents, and ocean climate events – like “El Niño” and “La Niña” could be explored.

With my finger in the wind at the time, I had also read that a communication system that had been used for decades as a surreptitious Navy submarine communication channel – ultra-long wavelength radio frequencies, was being revealed by a new line of surveillance-satellite magnetometers. These orbital magnetometers could easily see the ultra-long antennas that the submarines trawled along the ocean surface in order to receive these signals. The satellites could see all of these antennas, thus revealing the presence of the otherwise invisible subs.

Putting two and two together; if the Navy replaced the radio waves with long wavelength acoustical signals, they could replace the radio communication channel with an acoustical one – providing the necessary cloak of invisibility to the submarines. This really became the harbinger of the age of underwater acoustical communications.

But as I have mentioned before, what sounds like a brilliant idea from a physical oceanographer’s perspective is a pretty lousy idea from the perspective of marine bioacousticians – because humans aren’t the only animals using sound communication in the ocean.

The “Cell Towers on the Ocean Floor” is a metaphor used to help people equate concerns a lot of folks have about the health impacts of us living in a habitat saturated with Radio Frequency (RF) Electro-Motive-Forces (EMF) from our cell phones, WiFi, and other RF energy sources. And there is ample reason to be concerned, because we are living in an EMF lab wondering what might happen next.

You may know that the micro-wave oven principle was discovered by a physician who was called up to a US military base along the Defense Early Warning line – the DEW line in the 1960s.

Soldiers stationed at the base were getting sick after a number of months being there, and had to be sent back to the States. In diagnosing the problem, the physician found that the internal tissues of these men appeared to be cooked. In doing an analysis, they found a high-density EMF source on the base with a wavelength close to the molecular dimensions of water. It turned out that these high energy waves were oscillating in resonance with water, causing them to bounce around and heat up, internally cooking the soldier’s tissues. And the rest is history…

Fortunately for marine life, EMF does not penetrate seawater very effectively, but sound, and some light does. The energy sources for these communication channels mentioned in the underwater “Cell Towers” include both: sound at various frequencies which overlap the auditory bands of various animals (including humans), and blue light laser which – surprise! – overlaps the communication band of bioluminescent marine animals.

I will be looking into this with a mind to putting the brakes on – at least until we have some understanding of the impacts. But the momentum of industrialization somewhat presages turning the ocean into another energy impacts lab…