MG Blog

The hydrophones of German Alfred-Wegener-Institut transmitting live from the Ocean below the Antarctic Ice in the Atka Bay. This project is called PALAOA (PerenniAL Acoustic Observatory in the Antarctic Ocean) that means “whale” in Hawaiian.

Click here for mp3 audio stream.

Please note, this transmission is not optimized for easy listening, but for scientific research. It is highly compressed (24kBit Ogg-Vorbis), so sound quality is far from perfect. Additionally, animal voices may be very faint. Amplifier settings are a compromise between picking up distant animals and not overdriving the system by nearby calving icebergs. So you might need to pump up the volume – but beware of sudden extreamely loud events.

There is also a webcam showing images like this one (click to enlarge)