There's a whale in the North Pacific that calls at 52 hertz. Blue whales call between 10 and 39 hertz. Fin whales around 20. The 52-hertz call sits higher than both.
Nobody has ever seen it. It's known only by ear, through a hydrophone network the U.S. Navy built to track Soviet submarines and opened up for science after the Cold War. First heard in 1989. Heard every season since, from August until it swims out of range in January, offshore California up to the Aleutians.
Here's the part the legend skips: the call has been getting deeper. By 2004 it had drifted down to around 50 hertz, the way a voice settles as its owner grows up (Watkins et al., Deep-Sea Research I, 2004). The loneliest voice in the ocean is still changing.
And in 2010 a sensor off California caught a second 52-hertz call. So maybe not one lonely whale. Maybe a few, sharing a pitch no one else uses.
(WHOI Oceanus, 2005)
Nobody has ever seen it. It's known only by ear, through a hydrophone network the U.S. Navy built to track Soviet submarines and opened up for science after the Cold War. First heard in 1989. Heard every season since, from August until it swims out of range in January, offshore California up to the Aleutians.
Here's the part the legend skips: the call has been getting deeper. By 2004 it had drifted down to around 50 hertz, the way a voice settles as its owner grows up (Watkins et al., Deep-Sea Research I, 2004). The loneliest voice in the ocean is still changing.
And in 2010 a sensor off California caught a second 52-hertz call. So maybe not one lonely whale. Maybe a few, sharing a pitch no one else uses.
(WHOI Oceanus, 2005)
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