OCEANOISE 2026 Session Panel (Click for movie)
Monday, May 25 was my first day at the OceanNoise conference in Vilanova i la Gertru – a small, picturesque town down the coast from Barcelona, Spain. Every three years this conference, organized by Michel Andre with the University of Catalonia, and his colleagues, brings together many of us who are involved in the various research and strategies around the acoustical intersection of human enterprise and marine bioacoustics. This conference has also been a chance for me to catch up with colleagues in the ocean noise field, some of whom I have known for over 20 years.
One of the virtues of OCEANOISE is that while it includes many academics, it also includes people in ocean policy, marine conservation, and ocean industries. So a lot of work gets done – not just through the presentations, key notes, and poster sessions, but also through the long lunches and social events that orbit around the many discussions stimulated by the programming.
Monday’s presentation sessions included “Renewable Energy” (meaning wind), “Emerging Topics,” and “Mapping and Modeling.” The offshore wind power session was heavy on pile driving noise attenuation technologies, and the biological and physiological effects of pile driving noise and vibration on marine fauna. The sessions are a set of topical 10 minute presentations followed by discussion driven by a panel of the presenters through questions from attendees and participants. These are pretty rich, given the density of experience in the room.
The “Emerging Topics” included topics that are truly emerging –Â like the potential acoustical impacts of deep-sea mining, but also topics that have been problematic forever, but are emerging as conservation scientists are coming to understand the complexity of the damage our ocean enterprises are inflicting. These include deeper assessments of shipping noise and seismic surveys – knowing what we know now.
This discussion migrated into the interesting realm of “metrics” – how our actions are measured and expressed in terms that are substantiated by science, as well as understood by people operating in the field and those who are regulating those operations.
This comes up occasionally; regulators want “go/no-go” decisions that trigger regulatory thresholds. But nature has none of these dichotomous boundaries. A simple semantic example in the ocean noise field is the distinction between “continuous” and “impulsive noise. These distinctions usher in their own sets of regulatory guidelines. So under these regulatory thresholds, underwater processing noise is considered “continuous,” and seismic airgun surveys are considered “impulsive.” But if there is a seismic survey that bangs away every ten seconds for six months, is there a part of that which might be considered “continuous?”
Given that noise exposure regulations kick in at sound exposure levels of 160dB (re: 1uPa) for impulsive noise, and 120dB for continuous noise, the time window that distinguishes the difference would have a pretty profound impact on regulatory thresholds.
This example may be academic, as even establishing the 120dB threshold was somewhat arbitrary – based on easily recognized behavioral disruptions in captive marine mammals exposed to noise at that level. (It was later found that at least with bowhead whales, behavioral disruptions were recognizable at 94dB exposure levels.) (Blackwell 2015).
What was woven through the “Emerging Topics” session was that as researchers have collected more data over the years, recognizing subtleties and nuance, and bringing up those annoying “shades of gray” in animals response, adaptations, and stress impacts that regulators hate.
What we do know is that mechanized human engagement in the ocean is disruptive to marine life. Current regulations hopefully provide “tolerability” guidelines for our various engagements for life in the sea. But it seems that given all of the recent collection of nuanced data, and the expanded analysis tools becoming available, the regulatory environment may be ripe for an update.