Sources of Underwater Noise
Christine Erbe, Alec J. Duncan, Alexander Gavrilov, M. Montserrat Landero, Robert D. McCauley, Iain Parnum, Chandra Salgado Kent, Evgenii Sidenko
Abstract
Abstract The marine soundscape, whether in coastal areas or the deepest ocean, in the tropics or at the poles, contains a myriad of sounds. Sounds may be grouped by their origin into geophony (e.g., wind, precipitation, waves, earthquakes, volcanoes, and ice), biophony (e.g., invertebrates, fishes, and marine mammals), and anthropophony (e.g., port construction, mineral and hydrocarbon exploration and production, renewable energy installation, and shipping). This chapter gives a brief overview of the geophony and biophony, and then focuses on the anthropophony. The sounds of boats and ships of various types, marine seismic surveys, drilling, dredging, pile driving, windfarms, geotechnical site investigations, sonars, echosounders, explosions, and acoustic mitigation devices are presented, along with their characteristic source levels and spectra. Approaches to modeling, in particular, the sounds emitted by ships, seismic airguns, and pile driving are discussed.