The Covid pandemic brought tourism to a near-halt in Alaska last year. What will happen to the majestic humpback whale when cruise ships and visitors return in August?
Christine Gabriele sat at her desk at the Glacier Bay National Park headquarters in Gustavus, Alaska, and turned up the volume on her computer.
The sound of gurgling and bubbling water enveloped the room. The lull was occasionally punctuated by the hollow roar of a male harbor seal, seeking to impress potential mates.
Gabriele's computer is at the end of a five-mile underwater cable that stretches into the frigid waters of the bay, a national preserve teeming with fish, birds, sea otters, dolphins, lovelorn seals, and the area's feature attraction - several hundred humpback whales, who migrate to Alaska from the waters around Hawaii during summer months.
For the past 18 months, what has been notable was what she hadn't heard nearly as much of - ships.
During a normal summer, Glacier Bay and the surrounding area buzzes with traffic, as vessels of all sizes, from massive, 150,000-tonne cruise liners to smaller whale-watching boats, ply the waters as part of Southern Alaska's massive tourism industry.
The Covid-19 pandemic brought all of that to a sudden halt. In 2019, more than 1.3 million people visited Alaska on cruise ships. In 2020, there were 48 - not even enough to fill a New York City subway car.
Overall marine traffic in Glacier Bay declined roughly 40%.
It takes about a dozen minutes of listening to the soothing hydrophone audio on a Thursday morning in late May to hear traces of human activity - in this case, the high-pitched whine of a small boat's propeller.
According to research by Gabriele and Cornell University Professor Michelle Fournet, the level of artificial sound in Glacier Bay last year dropped sharply from 2018 levels, particularly at the lower frequencies generated by the massive cruise ship engines. Peak sound levels were down nearly half.
All these afforded researchers an unprecedented opportunity to study whale behavior in the kind of quiet environment that hasn't existed in the area for more than a century.
Gabriele has already noted changes by analyzing hydrophone data and taking a small park service boat into Glacier Bay three times a week to photograph and identify whales.
Now, the humpbacks seem to be spreading out across larger swathes of the bay. Whales can hear each other over about 2.3km (1.4 miles), compared with pre-pandemic distances closer to 200m (650ft). That has allowed mothers to leave their calves to play while they swim out to feed. Some have been observed taking naps. And whale songs - the ghostly whoops and pops by which the creatures communicate - have become more varied.
Out in the middle of Glacier Bay on a park service boat, it was easy to see why the area is such a tourist attraction. The jade-green water is surrounded on three sides by sheer cliffs, glacier-fed waterfalls, and snow-capped peaks. The humpback whales themselves are majestic. They spray mist with an audible rush as they surface to breathe, then display their enormous triangular tails - each as unique as a fingerprint - before returning to the depths.
If visitors are lucky, they can witness a breach - a whale leaping out of the water in a remarkable display of cetacean acrobatics before crashing back into the water. Only then is the creature's remarkable size truly appreciable.
All this can be viewed from smaller whaleboats or the luxurious cruise ships, where passengers dine on lavish meals as their floating hotels ply the bay's deep waters right up to the edge of massive glaciers.
Gabriele acknowledged that the Covid lull in tourism was only temporary. She said she hoped her research - and long-standing efforts to regulate the ship traffic in Glacier Bay - will allow a balance to be struck between the environment and the human desire to witness, and be inspired by, nature's grandeur.
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