TWO GRAY WHALES SWAM CLOSE to the westernmost edge of Cape Lookout, a narrow headland that juts out nearly two miles into the Pacific on the northern Oregon Coast. I peered down from a four-hundred-foot basalt cliff topped with thick salal and giant Sitka spruce. Below, the ocean rumbled as it swelled and pummeled rocks, leaving ruffles of white foam on the water. I scanned the immensity of the whales’ world, a deep blue that painted a straight line across the horizon for miles. But as I observed the elongated silver mass of their bodies from heads to flukes, just below the water’s surface, I also felt an intimacy. Their barnacle-covered backs dipped up and down as they curved their spines to cut through the current on their way north.

By the time the whales arrived at the cape, they had traveled roughly two thousand miles, nearing the halfway point on one of the longest migrations of any mammal on Earth. Every spring, they journey from their teal breeding lagoons off the coast of Baja California to the navy Arctic waters of the Bering and Chukchi Seas. They spend summer feeding their forty-five-ton bodies, scooping shrimplike crustaceans from the seafloor and filtering grub from muck with their mouths curtained in baleen.

As their floating forms passed by, I imagined the whales’ world as quiet and recalled my own experience ten years ago, when I snorkeled for the first time in Kauai. I still remember the sudden muffling that engulfed my senses when my ears transitioned from receiving sound through air to liquid. A breaking wave vaguely echoed, and I tried to anticipate it approaching the reef, but I couldn’t tell how far away it was until the current had already lifted me in a shroud of bubbles.

Our ear anatomy as land mammals is not built to differentiate sounds underwater. We tend to imagine that whales also hear nebulously, a reprieve from cars whooshing, airplanes rumbling, and the white noise of our fast-paced lives. But for marine mammals, sound is their world. It’s how they see in a vast, opaque habitat, where sunlight struggles to penetrate and plumes of silt and sand cloud the landscape. Some of the world’s loudest biological sounds, like the claws of snapping shrimp that emit a pop more piercing than the blast of a jet engine, and the echolocation clicks of sperm whales that boom forty-four times louder than a thunderclap, all evolved underwater. Evolution hasn’t favored specialized eyesight in whales. Instead, their bodies are crafted to powerfully vocalize and listen—to waves crashing, to kelp forests crackling, and to each other, calling.

Gray whales stay close to shore during their northbound migration. Beneath them, the continental shelf extends for miles in an underwater plateau. For much of the journey, the sounds of freighter ships, of bubbles bursting from massive propellers churning day and night to transport billions of dollars of commerce, provide a near-constant low rattle. It’s become harder for whales to hear their surroundings and each other. International shipping lanes are a relatively new addition for these giants who have migrated south to north, then north to south—ten thousand to fourteen thousand miles every year—for thousands of years.

Scientists don’t know exactly how whales navigate such long distances. Some researchers have theorized that whales create an acoustic memory of their migration. Maybe the individuals below me remember the particular sound of how surf crashes into the unique contours of Cape Lookout. They may belt a low moan and listen to how it ricochets off the shoreline and moves across the shelf to understand where they are. Like us, they must hear their way through a developed and warming world that has become many decibels higher since the Industrial Revolution and European colonization.

But both our world and theirs have also grown quieter.

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