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An Exciting New World Opening to Civilian Scientists{{/B}} It is hard to track the blue whale, the ocean's largest creature, which has almost been killed off by commercial whaling and is now listed as an endangered species. Attaching radio devices to it is difficult, and visual sightings are too unreliable to give real insight into its behavior. So biologists were delighted early this year when, with the help of the Navy, they were able to track a particular whale for 43 days, monitoring its sounds. This was possible because of the Navy's formerly top-secret system of underwater listening devices spanning the oceans. Tracking whales is but one example of an exciting new world just opening to civilian scientists after the cold war as the Navy starts to share and partly uncover its global network of underwater listening system built over the decades to track the shops of potential enemies. Earth scientists announced at a news conference recently that they had used the system for closely monitoring a deep-sea volcanic eruption (爆发) for the first time and that they plan similar studies. Other scientist have proposed to use the network for tracking ocean currents and measuring changes in ocean and global temperatures. The speed of sound in water is roughly one mile a second-slower than through land but faster than through air. What is most important, different layers of ocean water can act as channels for sounds, focusing them in the same way a stethoscope (听诊器) does when it carries faint noises from a patient's chest to a doctor's ear. This focusing is the main reason that even relatively weak sounds in the ocean, especially low-frequency ones, can often travel thousands of miles. |