Loss of intensity and diversity of noises in ecosystems reflects an alarming decline in healthy biodiversity, say sound ecologists
Sounds of the natural world are rapidly falling silent and will become “acoustic fossils” without urgent action to halt environmental destruction, international experts have warned.
As technology develops, sound has become an increasingly important way of measuring the health and biodiversity of ecosystems: our forests, soils and oceans all produce their own acoustic signatures. Scientists who use ecoacoustics to measure habitats and species say that quiet is falling across thousands of habitats, as the planet witnesses extraordinary losses in the density and variety of species. Disappearing or losing volume along with them are many familiar sounds: the morning calls of birds, rustle of mammals through undergrowth and summer hum of insects.
Today, tuning into some ecosystems reveals a “deathly silence”, said Prof Steve Simpson from the University of Bristol. “It is that race against time – we’ve only just discovered that they make such sounds, and yet we hear the sound disappearing.”
“The changes are profound. And they are happening everywhere,” said US soundscape recordist Bernie Krause, who has taken more than 5,000 hours of recordings from seven continents over the past 55 years. He estimates that 70% of his archive is from habitats that no longer exist.
Reminds me of that report from a couple years ago that wildlife populations have seen close to a 70% decrease in the last 50 years. Basically over my lifetime 2/3rds of what makes the world wonderful has disappeared.
In the same timeframe, the number of humans has grown by 100%. Basically twice as much of what makes the world terrible.
If I try to make the argument that the earth is overpopulated i’ll quickly get downvoted to oblivion in the typical thread.
There’s too many humans. The only hope of life surviving long term is the fall of humankind. The writing is on the wall in terms of heading towards an extinction event anyway so it’s not like we’ll need to do anything for it to happen.
Oh life will survive on this planet no matter what we do until the sun runs out of fuel. It’s just us and a lot of stuff that might go with us that science gets concerned about.
It’s basically impossible to wipe the earth of every last living species even if we nuke the surface of the earth and cause a nuclear winter some species would survive.
deleted by creator
We are single handedly dooming our planet so a handful of people can be unbelievably wealthy. The vast majority of our resource expenditure is unnecessary. But the moment anyone stops the rat race means starvation, imprisonment, or execution. The human race is pitiful. I just hope we all can emancipate ourselves and bring humanity back in line with the reality of the situation.
there’s at least 15 billion hands. Maybe 15.5.
15.5 billion handedly destroying the planet so that fewer than a few thousand hands can have most of the wealth.
This implies every hand has an equal part in the destruction, which isn’t quite an accurate representation.
No individual cog chooses to make the machine run, or would given the choice, but cogs they are, all.
Capital will not rest until every cog is installed and generating the maximum amount of profit. Until of course, the cogs cease to be profitable. Then they will be discarded.
Are you calling indigenous people, who live as hunter gatherers, cogs in the machine? Or are you just not counting them?
I think there are some groups of people that get a pass when it comes to blame for the destruction of our planet. It’s a very insignificant amount of people in comparison to the total population, but they exist.
They’re not profitable, they will either be made profitable, or they’ll be removed. The lands they inhabit will be repurposed and stripped off all resources.
This is actively already happening. It’s happening right now, while you’re reading this.
The relentless pursuit of capital has no room for those that do not contribute.
Remember the Permian-Triassic extinction? Now THAT seemed like it doomed the planet, right? Two mass extinction events, BLAM-BLAM, back to back!
80% of marine invertebrate species and 70% of terrestrial vertebrate species WIPED OUT FOREVER.
Too much oxygen sometimes, too little others - that time it rained for 2 million years - the two times volcanoes froze the Earth.
Yet like the Dude, the Earth abides.
Too much oxygen sometimes, too little others - that time it rained for 2 million years - the two times volcanoes froze the Earth.
That’s right. In a meager checks notes 2M years, the native floura and fauna will be back on their feet, maybe, we hope.
Yet like the Dude, the Earth abides.
We’re enjoying a certain degree of selection bias. We exist here because our planet did eventually recover. But this outcome wasn’t predetermined.
Along the way, we may end up destroying things that are ultimately unrecoverable. The eye-sight of the trilobyte was a happy little accident no living species has yet been able to duplicate. Anerobic life has been relegated to the most remote and microscopic corners of the world. Natural longevity has degraded in younger variants and our genetic code is overloaded with failed, silenced adaptations that leave mammals more prone to cancer and other genetic defects that our historical counterparts are less frequently burdened by.
And that’s assuming we aren’t on an unwitting collision course with a real end game disaster - like the hyper-corrosive atmosphere of Venus or the depleted atmosphere of Mars.
What are the odds something as complex and intricate as the human brain will exist before our star goes nova and the planet is consumed in its expansion? It took us 4.5B years to get here. Crazy to toss it all out the window because some business nerds in DC and Detroit hate trains.
There is no native anything. We’re ALL transitional species. OF COURSE things get destroyed that are unrecoverable. We don’t have fish with armor. We don’t have giant sloths with stony skin. Trilobites are ALL OVER the Fossil record. We don’t have a single one today.
Let’s stop trying to preserve this thin slice, this snapshot of evolution as though it were the final destination. It’s not.
I like people; I’m one of them. But humans have only been here a few hundred thousand years. Life wasn’t struggling to produce US. We’re a (in our own minds) happy accident, produced by the opportunities afforded us in one of those earlier extinctions.
We will not be throwing away 4.5B years of evolution. We’ll just be demonstrating that too much intelligence is not a successful evolutionary trait.
There is no native anything.
That’s a sloppy use of the term
