A year-long recording of the songs of Beluga whales has been salvaged from the Arctic after the crew of a Swedish icebreaker chanced upon a research buoy adrift in hazardous pack ice. A team tracking the device from California said they had almost given it up for lost when a "miracle" run of
KIRUNA, Sweden - A year-long recording of the songs of Beluga whales has been salvaged from the Arctic after the crew of a Swedish icebreaker chanced upon a research buoy adrift in hazardous pack ice.
Scripps began deploying the buoy for year-long stints on the seabed in the Barrow Strait in the Canadian Arctic in 2013, aiming to use the sounds it registered to better understand the impact of climate change on the region's marine life. But two consecutive summers of heavy pack ice have prevented Jones and Randy Nungaq, a resident of Resolute Bay, from conducting their annual boat trip to maintain the buoy since 2017. The instrument only resurfaced in mid-July when a passing iceberg appears to have dragged it up from the seafloor.Jones said he monitored the buoy as it drifted loose for about 10 days, fearing all the while that massive ice sheets would crush the device like a"trash compactor.
The crew initially tried to retrieve the instrument using a small boat, but then resorted to the riskier option of using the Oden's thrusters and reinforced prow to prise it from an ice floe on July 25. "So really more than the loss of the instrument, it's the loss of the data if we weren't able to recover this, and so that's why we're here," said Loose, a professor at the Graduate School of Oceanography at the University of Rhode Island.
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