Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (EFE).- With the right equipment, the noise caused underwater by ships entering and leaving the port of New York can be recorded on European coasts, say scientists working in this field. And it is only the tip of the iceberg of a problem of enormous and growing dimensions, which affects almost all the oceans and puts marine life at risk.
The Oceanic Platform of the Canary Islands (Plocan) brings together this week in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria representatives of scientific institutions from nine European countries that work in a coordinated manner to try to address this problem, from understanding how noise affects each species to design of new models of propellers that help make maritime traffic a little quieter.
But with around 100,000 ships navigating the different oceans, many of them concentrated in passages with very high levels of maritime traffic, such as the English Channel, some researchers wonder why not act now on the most immediate thing: speed.
Slower, less noise
With a simple 20% reduction in the speed at which it is sailing, the underwater noise emitted by a ship drops very significantly, almost always more, without the need to change anything else in its propulsion system to make it more efficient. and silent, explains Plocan researcher José Antonio Díaz Ávila, who is coordinating this meeting of the “Saturn” project.
Díaz Ávila acknowledges that sailing more slowly can affect the costs of the shipping companies, because it increases the delivery times of the goods, but probably also reduces their energy consumption.
However, he defends that this is a matter subject to legal regulation, both nationally and internationally, and puts it in these terms: “If we have limited speed on highways to avoid deaths, why can’t navigation speed be reduced to improve the health of marine ecosystems?
All species are affected
And it is that noise not only affects cetaceans, on which the problem tends to focus, but also to a greater or lesser extent all marine beings: fish, cephalopods and numerous molluscs, warns Gerry Sutton, representative in this project of the University College of Cork (Ireland).
“Almost all species are affected. In the sea, living beings are adapted to use sound for almost everything, because there are many areas of the ocean where light hardly reaches”, he explains.
However, all the seas are flooded with noise generated by man, with few exceptions, such as Antarctica and small areas of the oceans that, due to the physical characteristics of their bottoms, enjoy a certain silence, details Michael Ainslie, a researcher in Germany. Jasco Applied Sciences consultancy, specialized in monitoring underwater noise.
To the point that, at certain frequencies, such as those between 50 and 100 hertz, it is already impossible to know what the “natural noise” of the oceans is, because they are saturated by emissions from ship engines.