Published 2026-05-16 · data 2022 · percent of ocean area with shipping noise
Ship noise drowns whale song
Container routes are acoustic highways. Marine mammals navigate by sound — engines scramble it.
Whale song is built to travel — and in 2022, most of the ocean was loud enough to drown it. IMO and Duke University noise maps put 62% of ocean area under elevated low-frequency shipping noise. Container lanes run like acoustic highways through migration routes, scrambling the cues marine mammals rely on to navigate, feed, and find one another.
1 cell = 0.1 percent of ocean area with shipping noise (0.1% of ocean acoustic footprint) · 1,000 cells
Context
The headline figure: 62% of ocean area experienced elevated low-frequency noise from shipping in 2022, according to IMO and Duke University mapping. The remaining 38% of ocean area splits into regional bands — Asia and the Pacific at 19.8%, Africa at 10.6%, and the Americas at 7.6%.
Low-frequency sound travels far underwater, and it lands squarely in the range whales use for long-distance calls. On busy container lanes, engine roar can mask those signals, shrinking the effective ocean each whale can hear.
The mapping is tied to the International Maritime Organization, the UN specialized agency for shipping safety and the prevention of marine pollution by ships. Its remit is exactly where this problem lives: human-made pressure on the marine environment, accumulating one voyage at a time.
IMO / Duke shipping noise maps: majority of ocean experiences elevated low-frequency noise.
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Credit this grid as Inagrid — https://inagrid.com/e/2026-05-16-noise-oceans