Beneath the Arctic Ocean is an orchestra featuring natural and human composers, from cracking sea ice and whistling beluga whales to humming shipping-vessel engines. Researchers from MIT Lincoln Laboratory heard some of this cacophony when analyzing data from commercial off-the-shelf sensors that they integrated and deployed in 2024 during the U.S. Navy's Operation Ice Camp (OIC). This past March, during OIC 2026, the researchers returned to the Arctic with a higher-fidelity version of one of the sensors, a geophone, which detects vibrations in the sea ice. "We're interested in things that make sound underneath the ice," says Ben Evans, a researcher in the laboratory's Advanced Undersea Systems and Technology Group. "For example, our OIC 2024 data contained marine-mammal songs. We need a better understanding of how such signals propagate through ice, and how to distinguish these signals from other sources." This underwater soundscape is shifting as sheets of Arctic sea ice rapidly...
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