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Just 2 minutes ago, a sperm whale swam by about 4 kilometres south of Cassis on the French Mediterranean coast. From my desk in London, I heard its whistle. Thanks to a new website, so can you.
The
LIDO (Listening to the Deep Ocean Environment) site offers a live feed to 10 hydrophones sprinkled around European waters, and one in Canada. Several more are scheduled to come soon in Canada and in Asia.
The network's primary aim is to record and archive long-term subsea noise so that researchers can study the effects of human activity on whales and dolphins.
It is the brainchild of Michel André, a bioacoustician at the Technical University of Catalonia in Barcelona, Spain. He and his colleagues have spent the past 10 years placing hydrophones on the seabed, on existing research platforms that monitor earthquakes and tsunamis, for instance, or detect neutrino particles from space.