The Cold War’s Accidental Whale Observatory
- Built to track enemy submarines, the Navy’s underwater listening network inadvertently revealed that whales may be singing across entire oceans
By David Rothenberg
9:39 AM CDT on June 4, 2026
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Yet the thousand-mile song takes hold of our imagination right away: “I could show you the evidence today. I can listen in Puerto Rico to a whale way up on the Grand Banks. Can the whales do that? You might well ask, ‘What would they have to say?’ Then you’re suddenly putting on this silly human restriction. A whale might turn around and say to me, ‘What would you possibly have to say to one another sitting just two meters apart?’”
Like so many great scientists, Clark is not afraid to be a bit of a dreamer. More than once, he has sought out the advice of musicologists: “Marty Hatch, a specialist in Indonesian gamelan here at Cornell, had this to say to me, ‘You know Chris, you look at all this singing as data, but I think of it as a musical, emotional experience.’ Musicians hear song, and this is where I sometimes lean away from the scientific and tend to agree with them. Why can’t we just appreciate it as a phenomenon that is phenomenal?”
No human musician could stay in time counting as slowly as these whales do. These incredibly low thumps and moans are rhythms at such a lax pace that they are barely perceptible to human beings. Speed a blue whale song up 10 times, and 30 minutes becomes three. Move the pitch up to the realm of a cello, bowhead song, or a human moan, and exactly every three seconds comes the same soft moan. Only when we slow down time do we hear the thousand-mile song, a great sigh in the deep sound channel, echoing from one end of an ocean to another.
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Hard not to be fascinated by the whale sounds story. Like birds, we know so little about their vision; so too, we seem to know so little about whales.
Maybe someday, humans may truly appreciate the beauty of the natural world around us.
It reminds me of the Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986).
The crew travels back in time to 1986 San Francisco to bring back two humpback whales — George and Gracie — because an alien probe is destroying Earth waiting for a response from humpback whales, which are extinct in the 23rd century. They need the whales to “answer” the probe.
Why is that so hard to imagine?
Maybe we do need “time travel”! Can you imagine if the cure for cancer or some other terrible disease was contained in the passenger pigeon?
Remember Colossal Cave Adventure by William Crowther, expanded by Don Woods. “You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building.” When I was playing that, I had friends, who after killing the snake in an early cave, became disgusted with the game when they couldn’t get past the bird in (I think) Cave 7. Of course, I, like several others, never told them their mistake. It became a standing joke in the in the nerd circles about noobs and I D ten errors.
Laugh!
From that single lesson, I learned one should never destroy what you can not create. Seem like a good heuristic (rule of thumb) for life.
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Reinke Faces Life 