Climate change is usually measured and understood in numbers. But you can also experience the planet’s changing climate by listening.
As part of this year’s Climate Forward conference, we wanted to find a new way for attendees to understand how our planet is changing. We spoke with scientists and researchers who are capturing natural soundscapes before they change forever.
We compiled the work of three researchers to create an audio installation, called the Sounds of Climate Change, that offers a sonic tour of the underwater Arctic, a melting glacier and the Amazon rainforest. (You can listen to each of them below).
Bernie Krause, a prominent audio ecologist, coined the term “biophony” to describe earthly sounds from nonhuman organisms, like the calls, songs and buzzes produced by animals and insects. Paired with nonbiological sounds of the Earth, or the “geophony,” these layers of sound make up the ambient symphony of our planet. And as our planet warms, this natural soundscape is shifting in surprising ways.
For those who have spent their careers listening closely, these changes are not abstract.
“When I started going up to the Arctic, I thought I would be spending my career listening to bowhead whales,” said Kate Stafford, a bioacoustician at Oregon State University. “But what I’ve ended up doing is listening to climate change.”
Dr. Stafford records what she calls the “underwater jungle.” By lowering hydrophones, or waterproof microphones, into the frigid ocean, she captures bowheads moaning, belugas whistling and even the deafening sound of air guns being used in oil and gas exploration. She has heard the shrinking sea ice disrupt animal migration patterns and introduce new predators. As the planet warms, the waters of the ice-covered Arctic is becoming louder and stormier.
Ludwig Berger, a sound artist from Alsace in France, first recorded the sounds of the Morteratsch Glacier in Switzerland more than a decade ago. What he heard astonished him: Deep resonances of ancient air bubbles being released from crevices and making sounds like wailing synthesizers.
As Mr. Berger put it, he records “last sounds.” Each time he returns to record, he has to climb farther up the mountain to reach the ice, as the glacier has retreated. The locations of many of the sounds you’ll hear in his soundscape are now gone, he said. “There’s no ice left there, there’s just a bare rock,” he said.
Izabela Dluzyk, a field recordist from Poland, grew up memorizing bird calls and listening closely to sparrows. Inspired by a fascination with parrots, she crowd-funded her way to the Tambopata National Reserve in Peru to record the dusk and dawn symphonies of the rainforest.
Blind since birth, Ms. Dluzyk was accompanied into acoustically lush areas of the Amazon by her brother and her Amazonian guide. She captured a thunderous ritual of macaws gathering at eroding clay banks along the Tambopata River, eating the sodium-rich soil that is essential to their health and to raising their chicks.
But years of severe droughts threaten to disrupt that delicate balance and turn the sound-rich canopy into grassland. “Rainforests are so fragile,” Ms. Dluzyk said. “ We need to become fascinated with what we can hear.”
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