The Atlantic - October 2019

18 OCTOBER 2019 THE ATLANTIC

 I

S ANY environment

more secluded from

our imagination than

the seas surrounding

Antarc tica? Icebergs grind

above a seabed dotted

with salps, sea squirts,

sponges, and other barely

animate organisms. The

sun scarcely rises for half

the year. Under the ele-

mental conditions at these

latitudes, Antarctic blue

whales exist in a world

defined by bioacoustics.

Blue whales, Earth’s larg-

est animals, call to others

of their kind, though

exactly what these cries

communicate remains

a mystery. Whether to

attract a mate, to repel a

rival, or for some other

social purpose, the sounds

blue whales make are

less song, more drone—a

tectonic rumble on the

furthest edge of human

hearing. That the sounds

of blue whales seem

simple might suggest they

are unchanging across

generations. But these

atonal sounds have begun

evolving. Since at least

the 1960 s, their pitch has

downshifted the equiva-

lent of three white keys on

a piano. Scientists have

theories as to why—some

worrisome, some hopeful,

all involving humans.

The deepening of Ant-

arctic blue whales’ sounds

is not unique to the sub-

species. Groups of pygmy

blue whales found near

Madagascar, Sri Lanka,

and Australia, as well as

fin whales, which live in

seas around the world,

have also dropped their

pitch. (Even before this

change, fin whales emit-

ted sounds so low as to be

nearly imperceptible to

humans; the wavelengths

of their calls were often

longer than the bodies of

the whales themselves.)

In a study last year that

analyzed more than 1  mil-

lion individual recordings

of whale calls, scale shifts

were found across species,

and among populations

that don’t necessarily

interact with one another.

Which is to say, whatever

has triggered the change

doesn’t seem to have a

specific geographic origin.

The underwater

clamor caused by mari-

time traffic and extractive

industries might seem

a likely culprit. After all,

such noise is known to

interrupt whales’ foraging

and interfere with their

vocal inter actions. But

although some whales

do adapt, in limited ways,

to artificial sounds in the

ocean—by pausing their

calls to avoid competing

with the passage of cargo

ships, for example—

scientists don’t believe

that the deepening whale

calls are a response to

sonic pollution. They have

identified lowered pitches

even across populations

of whales that live in seas

without major shipping

routes, where mechanical

noise is negligible.

• ANIMAL KINGDOM

Going Deep

Why whales have dropped

their vocal pitch

BY REBECCA GIGGS

DISPATCHES

reason she met Bill Clinton on the day of
the alleged attack was to ask for his help
in procuring more funds for needy long-
term-care patients.
For most of her life, Broad drick said,
she was politically independent: Clinton’s
race for governor was the first time she
ever showed the slightest interest in poli-
tics, and she only got involved because a
friend in her women’s league talked her
into it. She voted for George W. Bush twice
but threw in with Barack Obama in 2008,
and even gave $3,000 to his campaign,
she said. At first she wasn’t sold on Trump:
“I did not know what to make of this man.”
Then, in May 2016, she watched an epi-
sode of Hannity in which Trump used the
word rape to describe Broad drick’s claim—
it was a word she’d avoided. “I almost
fell out of my chair. That’s when I was
firmly in his corner,” she told me. “It was
personal.” She felt vindicated, believed.
Around this time, she also started gravi-
tating toward Trump’s policies. She liked
the border wall and his ideas for stimu-
lating the economy, and she appreciated
that this man seemed to be sacrificing a
comfortable life to make America ... “bet-
ter,” she said.
When the campaign called, the day
after the infamous Access Hollywood
tape was released, to ask if she could fly
to St. Louis for the debate, she went to
Kevin for advice. “He told me, ‘Don’t do
it, Mom—they’re just using you.’ ” But she
told her son that she didn’t much mind
being used if that meant under lining
the hypocrisy of Hillary Clinton: How
could she, of all people, express outrage
about the tape? “The Republicans use
the Clinton victims the same way the lib-
eral media uses the victims—the supposed
victims— of Mr. Trump and [Supreme
Court Justice Brett] Kava naugh,” Broad-
drick said. “It’s truly politics.” She does
have her limits, though. When she got
wind that campaign operatives were
angling to seat her within spitting dis-
tance of Bill Clinton at the debate in
hopes of provoking a confrontation, she
was horrified. “I would have walked out
if that had happened,” she told me.
After the election, an unlikely turn of
events: Broad drick received something
of a collective mea culpa from the left.
MSNBC’s Chris Hayes tweeted that Dem-
ocrats were “overdue for a real reckon-
ing with the allegations against Clinton”;
the New York Times columnist Michelle

Goldberg published an op-ed headlined

“I Believe Juanita”; and The Washington

Post’s Richard Cohen wrote that he regret-

ted dismissing Broad drick’s plausible

charges for so long. The proximate cause

of the re assessment was #MeToo; the

immediate one, at least for Cohen, was an

interview Broad drick did last fall for Slow

Burn, Leon Neyfakh’s blockbuster podcast

about Clinton’s impeachment. Some com-

bination of the episode’s timing (on the

heels of Kavanaugh’s Senate testimony)

and Broad drick’s beat-by-beat re telling of

her interaction with Clinton— “He grabs

me and that’s when things turned really

bad”—upended people’s assumptions.

“Gruesome” is how Neyfakh described the

interview when we spoke on the phone.

Broaddrick is grateful for her newfound

backing from bold-faced liberal names,

but also wary of it, mostly because the

#MeToo movement itself hasn’t exactly

welcomed her. In 2017, Broad drick was

approached by Time magazine about

participating in what would turn out to

be its Person of the Year issue celebrating

sexual-harassment whistle-blowers, and

though she submitted a blurb in support

of #MeToo, it ended up on the cutting-

room floor. (A spokesperson for Time said