Michel André, Director of the Laboratorio de Aplicaciones Bioacústicas (LAB) has developed a fabulous ocean monitoring tool called LIDO – “Listening to the Deep Ocean” that incorporates a number of hydrophones in the Mediterranean, Atlantic, North Sea and Pacific Ocean. You can listen to live and archived signals to hear what the noise is all about.
While marine hydrophone arrays have been operating for decades, the LIDO project is remarkable because signals from large areas of the deep ocean are easily available to the public “on demand.”
LAB has also been perfecting a way to evaluate the noise profiles without human intervention. Heretofore deep water recording required someone listening to the sounds to identify, qualify, and quantify the sources. With the vast volumes of recorded data made available to “cheap digital storage,” thousands of hours of data were being lined up for evaluation by eager undergrads.
Having computerized identification and statistical tools allows this human capital to be focused on more critical tasks.
The LIDO site is definitely worth poking around and spending a bit of time on. While shipping noise dominates most channels, you can also hear seismic surveys and see (through the metrics) the acoustical presence of dolphins, sperm, and baleen whales.
More importantly for the purpose of conservation; all of this is being made available to everyone without charge.