NOAA Identifies Mystery Noise as Minke Whale

Anonymous Cowherd writes "An underwater noise that has long confounded Navy sonar operators turned out to be a call of the minke whale, the Sacramento Bee reports. Scientists at the Southwest Fisheries Science Center in San Diego made the discovery this fall when they heard the noise during a research expedition and saw a minke whale surfacing. While the story mentions minkes in the North Pacific, here's a sample from an Atlantic minke."

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In other news

[brejc8]

Whale researchers have found what the annoying sound that keeps interrupting their recordings of Minke Whales. The sonar pings have been desturbing whase scientists for years. The source was unknown until recently when a submarine surfaced shortly after destroying a research crews sound recording.

Re:A sample?

[orangesquid]

If you look at the page source, you'll see this tag:
embed src="atlminke10x.mov" width="80" height="20" type="video/quicktime" controller="true" autoplay="false"
I used wget to fetch http://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/explorations/sound01 /background/seasounds/media/atlminke10x.mov and it played just fine in mplayer. I used the PCM writer plugin and Notlame to make an mp3 of it (please mirror!!!!!!)