🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <2mnrda$b12@galaxy.ucr.edu>, john baez <baez@guitar.ucr.edu> wrote:
>Ahem, ignore that previous post please.  Today I read in the paper that
>some jerks at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego want
>to put a loudspeaker in the Pacific off Big Sur and Kauai that will
>broadcast a 195-decibel sound underwater every four hours for *twenty
>minutes* from now until 2004!!!  This is in the March 22nd LA Times.  As
>you know, whales communicate by sound and can, I think, hear pretty
>well, and it is already believed that underwater noise from ships cause
>whales and other marine life problems.  As you also know, whales like to
>migrate along the California coast.  This crappy idea was invented by
>Walter Munk of Scripps and is being funded by the Defense Department.
>The goal is to see how long it takes the sound to go from its point of
>origin across long distance through the ocean (the article hinted New
>Zealand), as a way of measuring the ocean temperature, to give us
>information about global warming.  Now perhaps this is fine and dandy,
>but this idea gives me the creeps, and I hope people who know about this
>sort of thing don't let this experiment proceed without having a darn
>good understanding of the possible consequences.  It sounds awful to me.

1) It sounds like the experiment maay be done too often.  Repeating it
on a yearly basis may be adequate.  The global ocean temeperature is not
going to change that rapidly.  There may be some unknown seasonal variation.

2) These sound experiments may be the best experiment devised so far to
ascertain whether global warming is occuring.  Atmospheric meaasurements
have too many local effects.