Recording a Sea of Sound

An expedition to capture the sounds and images of Arctic wildlife

By David O. Brown and Marc S. Dantzker

We left the Arctic Bay at 7:00 a.m., traveling aboard komatiks, large wooden sleds pulled by snowmobiles. Our four Inuit guides are all in their early twenties, and handle the snowmobiles as if they were born on them. The ride is cold and bumpy, and the novelty of the white expanse of ice wears off some four hours into the trip.

Polar bears, the largest land carnivores, use their size and power to capture and kill prey such as ringed seals beneath the ice.

Photos by David O. Brown (4)

We sight two polar bear cubs, their yellowish fur giving them away against the bluer white of the ice and snow. On arrival at camp, we opt to head back out to find and film them again. In the 24-hour daylight of the Arctic summer, the light is best for filming around midnight. We have traveled less than an hour when we spot an adult polar bear stalking seals along a windblown pressure ridge. Ringed seals build birthing lairs beneath the ice in spring, and this bear is locating the dens, then lying in wait, listening intently, before pouncing down through the roof of the ice den, attempting to grab a seal before they escape under water.

--Excerpts from David Brown's log, May 29, 2005

In May and June 2005, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's Macaulay Library mounted a recording expedition to the Canadian Arctic. It was the first of a series of trips to gather images and sounds for our Sea of Sound project. With funding from the National Science Foundation and the National Oceanic Partnership Program, we are creating educational outreach materials about the importance of sound in the marine environment.

Ringed seals are the most numerous and widely distributed mammals in the Arctic.

The Arctic is an ideal place to start our story. Many species of acoustically active marine mammals live there, including beluga whales, narwhals, and bearded seals. Another advantage of recording in the Arctic is that the acoustic environment is largely unaffected by human-caused sound. The noises of shipping, minerals exploration, military sonar, and shore-based machinery, pervasive in most of the world, are rarely heard in the far North.

We camped on the ice at the mouth of Admiralty Inlet at the northern tip of Baffin Island. We were waiting for the ice to break and move off. Belugas and narwhals mass along the ice edge, advancing to the west and south as the ice gives way, in search of Arctic char and cod.

King Eiders aggregate in open water after the ice breaks.

The ice was changing dramatically. Our guides wouldn't drive over certain areas and attempted to point out subtle differences that indicated thin ice to our uncomprehending eyes. At 11:00 p.m. one night we were forced to move camp on sudden notice; a formerly 1-meter lead in the ice that had opened to the shore side of us had widened overnight to some 4 meters. We could not risk finding ourselves adrift on an ice floe. Ten hours later we were safer, 2 kilometers back in the inlet.

Ivory Gull

The following two weeks yielded images of ringed seals lying by their ice holes, as well as birds such as the exquisite Ivory Gull, Snow Bunting, and Northern Fulmar that swooped and dove across the frozen waves of ice. A crack, or lead, in the ice afforded an opportunity to slip beneath the ice and test the underwater housing for the video camera, but the visibility was very poor, and there were of course no whales where they did not have ready access to the surface. The ice showed no signs of breaking up, and our anxiety grew as the last week of the trip arrived and we still had no open water in which to film whales.

Lowering hydrophones through a seal's breathing hole, we were amazed to hear a symphony of sound, dominated by the descending spiraling whistle of bearded seals. It sounded distinctly like the dropping bombs from the classic Atari game, Missile Attack. Not one of these elusive animals had been spotted topside during the trip, but their sound carried unmistakably through the turbid water.

Finally, on one of our daily forays, we sighted open ocean, albeit a surging sea too crowded with massive broken ice to enable diving. The following day proved magical.

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For permission to reprint all or part of this article, please contact Laura Erickson, editor, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, 159 Sapsucker Woods Rd., Ithaca, NY, 14850. Phone: (607) 254-1114. email: lle24@cornell.edu