Imagine the calm ocean sounds of the arctic. Beautiful, huh? Well, not quite. The Perennial Acoustic Observatory in the Antarctic Ocean, or PALAOA, has set up a live streaming system through which you can listen to the underwater activity of the Antarctic ocean via two hydrophones placed under the surface of the water. PALAOA cautions listeners that:

… this transmission is not optimized for easy listening, but for scientific research. It is highly compressed…so sound quality is far from perfect. Additionally, animal voices may be very faint. Amplifier settings are a compromise between picking up distant animals and not overdriving the system by nearby calving icebergs…A constant hiss pervading the signal is partly due to electronic noise as we push the hydrophone amplifiers to their limits, but also the natural ocean background noise made audible here through the use of ultra sensitive hydrophones. Additional broad band noise caused by wind, waves and currents adds to it on occasion. There a three sources of click-like interference: switching relais, electrostatic discharges caused by snow drift, and sferics produced by thunderstorms ten thousands of kilometers away.

Basically, you won’t be able to hear beautiful sea creature music from this broadcast, but it does provide a nice white noise source to fall asleep to. You can check it out here.

Sample noise
Filtered Sample

Source: Gizmodo.com