What Sparks It: That a government measures its environmental target by the loudness of the ocean is a curious, almost poetic way of explaining climate policy — perfect for the European gaze on Canadian quirks.
Lead: Somewhere off the coast of British Columbia, someone is counting decibels right now, not whales — and that’s exactly what’s meant to make Ottawa’s new promise measurable.
And they hear a lot — above all the engines of the tankers passing overhead.
The ocean has always been fitted out with noises and sounds. Water is not quiet. It thunders, roars, foams and hisses, because droplets by the million shape the sound. The whale community didn’t just get used to this — it was the very environment of the floating giants.
Since large-scale industrialisation, the whales have had to learn new sounds. These were mostly louder, more intense sounds, thundering and humming through the water worlds.
Currently only 76 whales remain in the genetically distinct southern orca community. They live in the waters of the southern Salish Sea and the Strait of Juan de Fuca. These orcas made headlines earlier this month for a different reason. A local resident orca was spotted pushing a dead orca calf through the water off Vancouver Island.
The calf quite certainly didn’t die of old age. At least, that’s what I think. The main item on the menu was Chinook salmon. But it’s barely to be found anymore, because pollutants in the water have sealed the salmon’s fate. That’s one side of the threatening coin. The other, very real threat looming over the orcas is so-called underwater noise, generated among other things by ship traffic or industrial activity at sea.
“Sound in the water is to orcas what vision is to us,” said Valeria Vergara, lead whale researcher at the Raincoast Conservation Foundation. A loud ocean impairs their ability to communicate and to feed. The noise was already far too loud three years ago.
The government of Prime Minister Mark Carney is fast-tracking an expansion of the Roberts Bank terminal near Vancouver, to accommodate the proposed Pacific Link oil pipeline. And that same government suspects that over the coming decades, large ship traffic is likely to increase significantly. Meaning the noise will become too much for the whales to digest. If, that is, they still find anything at all to keep their digestion occupied.
Mark Carney said last week that his government wants to mitigate these effects. How’s that supposed to work? The government is proposing an interim standard — a snapshot measurement of the noise level, so that the critical habitat of the endangered southern orcas doesn’t exceed 2023 levels.
What does that mean, concretely?
Measurements were taken at a hydroacoustic station in Boundary Pass in the Gulf Islands. The result shows an increase in average noise above natural conditions, from 3.4 decibels in 2017 to 5.1 decibels in 2023. That’s a 50 percent rise in noise levels in the whales’ habitat. The whales’ natural quiet time has been cut by more than half.
How is underwater noise even measured? Well, even among scientists the measuring method is contested. It’s hard, apparently, to squeeze noise levels into one measurable number. Between currents, ship traffic, and propellers of every type, you can’t capture reliable data at any one place and any one moment.
Well, that doesn’t exactly help the orcas secure their existence on the planet.
As a first step toward this task, a monitoring system is to be set up that can establish the baseline and track changes over time. Federal scientists and the Vancouver Fraser Port Authority have been working on the infrastructure for years. In 2014, the port authority launched the Enhancing Cetacean Habitat and Observation (ECHO) Program, which monitors ocean noise levels. Ships and their captains are asked, during certain seasons and in the whales’ key feeding areas, to voluntarily slow down to reduce noise.
Voluntarily?
A spokesperson told Canada’s National Observer in an email that more than 37,000 ship transits since 2017 have followed the request and the guidelines. The intensity of underwater sound in these areas has, as a result, reportedly been cut in half.
Let’s hope that the small orca community can one day confirm that these measures made their survival possible.
Hope dies last. The orcas, hopefully, too.
(Today’s Story was inspired by an article of Canada’s National Observer from October 8, 2026)
