The Arctic used to be a fairly quiet place. But as sea ice disappears and shipping lanes open up, the underwater acoustics have become a cacophony. And that’s not good for species like the narwhal that call the colder waters home.

      Jack Ewing ’18 works in the Scripps Whale Acoustics Laboratory at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California. He spends his days monitoring those acoustics through passive acoustic monitoring (listening underwater), which requires a lot of signal processing. When he’s not on an oceangoing research vessel in the Arctic gathering data, he’s spending hours analyzing and coding that data to discern the health of Arctic species.

      “We need to be able to create automated methods for extracting different signals in our acoustic data, such as narwhal echolocation clicks, vessel noise, naval sonar, walrus knocks, humpback songs, rain, wind, fish choruses, the list goes on,” Ewing says. “A lot of what we do in our lab includes some level of machine learning and training of neural networks to help in signal detection and classification.”

      Coding is absolutely necessary to the work he does.

      “Since we are recording underwater sound continuously at high frequencies for about a year, we collect a lot of data. For my research on behavioral responses of narwhals to vessels, I needed to create a timetable that described the presence of narwhals, the vessel noise levels, vessel proximity, and a host of environmental variables on a 1-minute resolution across five years, which came out to over half a billion rows of data,” he says.

      But it’s life on the ocean that he loves. Some of the high points Ewing has experienced on the ocean include seeing killer whales following a minke whale, having beluga whales push him around on a paddleboard, seeing beluga whales harass a swimming polar bear, and living in a town where polar bears regularly broke into stores.

      “Everyone left their houses and cars unlocked, and with the keys in the ignition of the cars so people could safely escape the bears if need be,” he says.

      The ocean has always been his place of escape, Ewing says, offering both clarity and challenge.

      “Originally, it was where I went to get away from the difficult things happening in life, a place where I felt more safe,” he says. “Over time, the ocean became more than just an escape—it’s where I’ve grown, both personally and professionally. The more time you spend with it, whether it’s sailing, surfing, or studying it, your perspective starts to change. As a sailor, the roughness of the water told me about the strength and direction of the wind. As a surfer, I learned how that same surface would change throughout the day as the land heated and the onshore winds grew.

      “And now, as a scientist, I can look at the ocean from the tops of cliffs and see the long lines of slick glassy water bordering darker rougher patches and know now that these are internal waves that will deliver cold and nutrient-dense water to the local kelp forests. It’s impossible to truly see or fully understand the ocean, but it’s a relationship that is constantly changing, and it evolves your perspective on how the natural world works. Acoustics allow me to explore this hidden world, especially in the Arctic with species like belugas and narwhals, and it helps me contribute to the larger effort of protecting these environments.”