Spectacular whale-shaped museum to open on Norway’s Arctic coast - Travel Tomorrow

Marina: Welcome to Deep Voices — I am so glad you're here. I'm Marina, a marine biologist and science communicator who has spent years falling deeper and deeper in love with whales and dolphins, and honestly, I have no plans to stop. This show is where we dive into their songs, their cultures, their astonishing minds, and the remarkable science working to understand what they're actually saying to each other. Marina: Before we dive in, a huge thank you to the sponsors who make Deep Voices possible. Ada, who helps businesses integrate A I into their workflows in smart, meaningful ways. Ago Consulting — that's "Ahh-Go" — silicon development consultants working across everything from A I to SoC design. And Zen Semiconductor, an umbrella company with a whole portfolio of businesses across the silicon industry. These are people building the future, and we're grateful they're bringing you this show. Marina: Today we have a beautiful episode for you. We're talking about a stunning new museum shaped like a whale rising from the Arctic sea. We're getting into Project CETI and the open-source technology that could — I mean genuinely could — help humans communicate with whales. And we have a story about the people who show up, year after year, to make sure some of the rarest whales on Earth don't disappear. Let's go. Marina: Okay, so — Voices of the Deep. I want to start by asking you to close your eyes for just a second. Imagine you're underwater, somewhere off the coast of Norway, in water so cold and so clear it almost feels like glass. And then you hear it. This low, impossibly vast sound rolling through the water around you. A whale song. Not metaphorically a song — an actual, structured, repeating, evolving musical composition produced by an animal the size of a school bus. Marina: Humpback whales are the composers of the cetacean world. The males sing — and I mean they really sing, sometimes for hours without stopping, sometimes for entire days. These songs have distinct phrases, which are arranged into themes, which repeat in a specific order. It is genuinely complex. Researchers have described the structure as having a hierarchical organization not entirely unlike human music. That's not me being poetic — that's what the science says. Marina: And here's the part that never stops giving me chills. These songs change. Every breeding season, males in a population gradually shift their songs, and they all shift together, as if the whole ocean is tuning in to the same radio station and updating to the new track. A new phrase spreads from whale to whale — not genetically, not by instinct, but by listening and learning. Cultural transmission. In the ocean. Marina: Researchers studying humpbacks in the Pacific have documented song revolutions — moments where a completely new song style sweeps through an entire ocean basin within just a couple of years. Males in Australia pick up a new motif, it spreads east across the Pacific, and before long, whales thousands of miles away are singing the same new song. Nobody fully understands why. Is it about attracting mates? Showing off learning ability? Coordinating something we haven't even thought to ask about yet? The honest answer is we don't know — and that is one of the most exciting sentences in science. Marina: What we do know is that these animals are not just making noise. They are producing, memorizing, and updating complex acoustic structures over time. And now, this tradition of honoring that — of making space for humans to listen and wonder — is being written into stone. Or rather, into architecture. A spectacular new museum is set to open on Norway's Arctic coast, and it is shaped like a whale. Not just whale-themed — actually whale-shaped, this sweeping, organic structure rising from the coastline like a humpback breaching from the sea. It is meant to immerse visitors in the world of whales, their biology, their sounds, their lives. And I think that matters. Because before you can care about saving something, you have to feel it. You have to hear it. Marina: Alright — Culture and Decoding. This is where things get genuinely mind-bending, and I want to take you into the world of sperm whales and a project that I think about a lot. Marina: Sperm whales communicate using clicks called codas. These are short, rhythmic patterns — click, click-click, click — like a kind of Morse code tapped out through the water. And for decades, researchers assumed these were just individual identification signals, maybe a way of saying "hey, it's me." But the deeper scientists looked, the more complex it got. Marina: Shane Gero is a biologist who has spent years — genuinely years of his life — in the waters of the Caribbean around Dominica, following specific sperm whale families. And what he and his colleagues found is that different whale clans have different coda repertoires. Not just slightly different — distinctly different, like dialects. A whale born into one clan uses different click patterns than a whale from another clan, even if they live in the same ocean. That is culture. Learned, inherited, maintained social culture passed down through generations of whales. Marina: And now Shane Gero is the biology lead for Project CETI — that stands for Cetacean Translation Initiative — which is one of the most ambitious scientific projects I have ever encountered. The goal is to use machine learning and A I to decode sperm whale communication. Not in a vague, someday-maybe way. They are deploying underwater microphones, attaching non-invasive bio-logging tags to whales, and collecting enormous amounts of acoustic data — thousands of hours of sperm whale codas — with the explicit aim of feeding it into natural language processing models to find structure, meaning, pattern. Marina: The comparison they draw is to how A I learned human language — by processing vast amounts of text and finding the underlying grammar. Could the same approach work for whale clicks? The honest answer is we don't know yet. But the fact that we're asking the question seriously, with the tools to potentially answer it, is extraordinary. Marina: And here's what makes it even more moving. Scientists involved in the project have recently released an open-source device — hardware and software that anyone can use to record and analyze cetacean communication. The whole architecture is being made publicly available. That means researchers in small island nations, students, community scientists — people anywhere with access to the ocean — can contribute. This isn't just science for elite institutions. It's an invitation. Come listen. Help us understand. Because the ocean's voices belong to all of us. Marina: What strikes me about Shane Gero's work specifically — and he talks about this beautifully — is that it's not just about data. He knows these whales as individuals. He knows their family histories. He's watched calves grow up. And that intimacy with real animals, real lives, is what grounds the science. You're not just processing signals. You're trying to understand a grandmother, a mother, a daughter, and what they mean to each other. Marina: Now — a cetacean and people story, and this one is close to my heart because it's about urgency, community, and showing up. Marina: The North Atlantic right whale. I want you to hold that name in your mind for a moment. There are fewer than 370 of these animals left on Earth. Fewer than 370. They are one of the most endangered large mammals on the planet, and they live along the eastern coast of North America — calving in the warm waters off Florida and Georgia in winter, then migrating north to feed in the Gulf of Maine and Canadian waters in summer. Marina: Every year, in Fernandina Beach, Florida — right there on the coast where these whales come to give birth — the community gathers for the Right Whale Festival. And the 2026 festival is coming up. Now I know a festival might sound like a fun, light thing — and it is, it's got music and art and education for kids — but I want you to understand what's underneath it. This is a community that has decided these whales matter. That the arrival of a right whale mother and her calf in their coastal waters is worth celebrating, worth protecting, worth showing up for. Marina: Right whales got their name because whalers considered them the "right" whale to hunt — they were slow, they floated when dead, they were rich in oil. And they were hunted nearly to extinction. Commercial whaling of right whales was banned, and the population has never recovered. Today the threats are entanglement in fishing gear and ship strikes. These are whales that swim in some of the busiest shipping lanes and fishing grounds on the Atlantic coast, and every year some of them don't make it. Marina: The New England Aquarium has one of the longest-running right whale research programs in the world. Their scientists have been tracking individual right whales since the 1980s — by the distinctive patterns of rough, raised skin on their heads, called callosities, which are unique to each animal like a fingerprint. Their naturalists — the people who go out on whale watch boats and help the public see and understand these animals — are part of a living chain of ocean literacy that stretches back decades. Marina: When a new calf is spotted off the Florida coast, it's a moment of genuine celebration in the scientific community. Researchers notify each other. They share photos. Because every single right whale birth matters. Every calf is a fraction of a percent of the total population. And when a whale is found entangled — which happens, and it is devastating — there are response teams trained and ready to go out in boats and attempt to cut the lines. These are people who have dedicated their lives to a species that is still here because of that dedication. Marina: That's what I think about when I think about the Right Whale Festival in Fernandina Beach. It's not just a party. It's a community saying: we see you. We know you're here. We're going to keep showing up. Marina: And that — that combination of knowing, and caring, and showing up — is what connects every story we've told today. The architect who designs a museum shaped like a whale so visitors can feel what it means to be near one. The scientists building open-source tools so the whole world can help decode what whales are saying. The researcher who learns the names and family trees of individual sperm whales because they are worth knowing. The festival-goers on a Florida beach celebrating the birth of a calf from a species on the edge. Marina: The ocean is full of voices. Ancient voices, complex voices, voices that carry culture and memory and love across thousands of miles of open water. We are just beginning to learn how to listen. And I believe — I genuinely believe — that if we listen well enough, carefully enough, humbly enough, what we hear will change us. Marina: Deep Voices, brought to you by Ada, Ago Consulting, and Zen Semiconductor. Thank you for being here. If this episode moved you, please subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who loves the ocean — or someone who should. Show notes with links to all the stories and research we talked about today are available right at the link in show notes. Stay curious, stay kind to the sea, and I'll see you in the deep.