![]() ![]() He made recordings of the 52Hz whale in 1993 and says it's not quite as anomalous as it might seem. One critic is Christopher Willes Clark of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. But some researchers question the narrative that the whale is lonely. Sound carries far in the ocean.)īill Watkins, a marine mammal researcher at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution poured over 12 years worth of recordings and concluded that the whale was certainly unique. (Though we have many recordings, no one has yet found the creature. There’s even a Kickstarter campaign built around finding the Lonely Whale. Many regard this whale as the loneliest in the world. Here’s 52’s sound, sped up to be more audible: "He's saying, 'Hey I'm out here,' " she said. But she agreed that there was something poignant about the finding. "The fact that this individual has been capable of existing in that harsh environment for at least these 12 years indicates there is nothing wrong with it," she said. Andrew Revkin from the New York Times spoke to Kate Stafford, a researcher at the National Marine Mammal Laboratory in Seattle who was listening to the whale’s sound: The odd pitch attracted the attention of researchers, media and the public-all of whom almost immediately latched on to the story of this whale, dubbed the 52 hertz whale or 52 blue. ![]() But here it was, right in front of them, the audio signature of a creature moving through Pacific waters with a singularly high-pitched song. Blue whales usually come in somewhere between 15 and 20-on the periphery of what the human ear can hear, an almost imperceptible rumble. Leslie Jamison writes in " 52 Blue" from the Atavist ( excerpted by Slate):įor a blue whale, which is what this one seemed to be, a frequency of 52 hertz was basically off the charts. But, strangely, it was coming in at a frequency of 52 hertz. On December 7, 1992, a technician noted a noise that appeared to be the song of a whale. They were originally supposed to pick up the rumble of Soviet subs, but when the array was partially declassified, researchers began to use it to listen to the noises of the ocean, a place that is anything but silent. The strange song was first heard in 1989, by a classified array of sensors-hydrophones spread across the floor of the Puget Sound by the Navy.
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