The Sound Beneath the Waves
波の下の音
One evening, Ao's calm movements suddenly became sharp and .
The whale turned in circles, and Sofia could not understand what was happening.
She asked her team how a healthy whale could change its behaviour so fast.
Nobody knew why Ao had started swimming in such a strange way.
Then the team heard it: a deep, painful beneath the waves.
A ship was mapping the sea floor, sending huge blasts of sound downward.
"This is the way that whales lose their sense of direction," Sofia said.
She explained how whales use sound to talk, hunt, and find their path.
For a whale, sound is the way that light is for human beings.
"Do you understand what these blasts do to them?" she asked the ship's .
She wanted to know why such loud surveys were allowed near migration routes.
The could not explain how the affected the animals below.
Sofia described the way that sound travels for hundreds of kilometres .
A whale cannot tell where its family is when the ocean is full of .
"Imagine how you would feel," she said, "if someone screamed in your ear all day."
The slowly understood how the problem really was.
Ao had stopped calling, because she could not hear whether others answered.
Sofia recorded how the whale's rose each time the machine fired.
She asked the company whether they knew how much they were causing.
The way that humans treat the ocean often ignores the lives inside it.
"Sound is how these animals survive," Sofia repeated to every reporter she met.
Finally, the ship agreed to pause its work until the whale had passed.
Slowly, Ao's movements became calm, and she remembered which way to swim.
Sofia wondered how many other whales were suffering where no scientist watched.