Thanks to PALAOA, the Perennial Acoustic Observatory in the Antarctic Ocean, which has two hydrophones powered by wind and solar set up to capture underwater sounds beneath the Ekström ice shelf, we can all listen live to ‘the music under the sea’, below the Antarctic Ice.
PALAOA’s website has set up a Livestream page and has links to the audio stream in both MP3 and OGG-Vorbis. While the achievement is fascinating, the audio might not be the best quality as its focus is scientific research, not to provide easy rock for a radio station.
Please note, this transmission is not optimized for easy listening, but for scientific research. It is highly compressed (24kBit Ogg-Vorbis), so sound quality is far from perfect. Additionally, animal voices may be very faint. Amplifier settings are a compromise between picking up distant animals and not overdriving the system by nearby calving icebergs.
According to PALAOA, providing the live audio stream has been quite a challenge. More than 15,000 km lie between Antarctica and their institute in Germany. First, the data is transmitted from PALAOA via wireless LAN to the German Neumayer Base. Then, a permanent satellite link transmits the data to the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany. Besides traveling such vast distances, the audio quality might suffer due to pushing the hydrophone amplifiers to their limits. Also, broad band noise caused by wind, waves and currents adds to the distortion.
Turns out Sebastian (that little singing crab from the Disney Classic, The Little Mermaid) was right. There is music ‘Under the Sea’. Though their “hot crustacean band” might not sound perfect, whoever thought you would ever be able to listen to the soothing sounds of the ocean under Antarctica in the comfort of your own home? Awesome.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
“the audio might not be the best quality as its focus is scientific research, not to provide easy rock for a radio station.”
You can say that again! However, for the layman it is still incredibly cool to “drop in” on scientific experiments as they take place. It really helps foster understanding of the hard slog that scientific labors really are!
It really does give the public a perfect opportunity to see research in action. I wish there were more programs just like this one, where the public could peer into what scientists are up to.
It would definitely foster more interest in future projects.