An international standards body is finalizing plans for an underwater Internet of Things — a global network transmitting data through the water itself, using sound. At 160–250 decibels, around the clock, across every ocean.
This is what that means — for the whales, the reefs, the fish, and eventually us. Scroll, drag, listen.
International standards bodies — ISO and IEC — are in the final stages of approving technical specifications for an "Underwater Internet of Things": a global network of acoustic sensors and modems that would communicate continuously through the ocean using sound waves at 160 to 250 decibels, around the clock, indefinitely.
Sound is not an ambient background in the ocean. It is the medium through which life perceives, navigates, and organizes itself — from the largest whale to the smallest coral polyp. For whales, dolphins, and porpoises, whose hearing ranges overlap precisely with the proposed signal frequencies, sound is the primary channel through which they build internal models of their environment, maintain social bonds across ocean basins, navigate, forage, and care for their young. A system broadcasting continuous broadband interference at these levels would not introduce noise into a quiet habitat. It would structurally dismantle the perceptual world that marine life has organized itself around for hundreds of millions of years — and close the ocean, as a place of genuine encounter, to humans as well.
A safer alternative exists: a fiber-optic and bio-friendly multi-modal architecture that delivers the same functional capability without saturating the ocean with constant high-intensity sound. The question is not whether this technology will exist. It is what principles will govern how it is built.
The standards have not yet been ratified. The window for shaping them — or stopping them — is open. But it is closing.
Each pulses data through the water as pressure waves. Drag the decibel dial to hear and see what changes as the network scales up to its planned operational range.
Audio is a loose approximation — your speakers can't safely reproduce 250 dB underwater. Real exposure would be orders of magnitude more intense.
Threshold of harm varies by species and signal. Each row shows the level at which meaningful disruption begins in the published literature. The bar fills red when the current level crosses the threshold.
Sound travels farther and faster in water than in air. Every 6 dB roughly doubles the audible range. At network scale, there is nowhere in the open ocean that is quiet.
Fiber-optic cables already carry almost every byte of the world's internet beneath the sea. Extending the pattern — rather than replacing it with sound — would protect marine life without sacrificing the goal.
The Quiet Ocean Standards Initiative (QOSI), operating under the U.S. 501(c)(3) Safe Smart Oceans, is the only organized effort working from inside the international standards process to ensure the underwater network adopted is one the ocean can live with.
QOSI's founder and director, Dr. Kathy Matara, holds the position of Convener of Working Group 7 (WG7) under ISO/IEC SC41 — the working group actively writing the technical standards. There is no comparable voice for ocean life anywhere else in that process. She is supported by Dr. Patrick J.O. Miller of the University of St Andrews, one of the world's most published researchers on the effects of underwater sound on cetaceans; Dr. Timothy Schoechle, an internationally recognized standards expert uniquely able to translate the scientific case into the technical language committee members will engage with; and a research team currently waiting for funding to begin formal counter-proposal work.
QOSI formally represents the United States, Scotland, and Canada on the international planning committees. This is not advocacy conducted from the outside. It is science and conscience working from within the process itself, at the moment when it still matters.
Contact your national standards body (ISO / ANSI / IEC) and ask them to back a quiet, fiber-first working group.
Learn how →Independent environmental impact research is what the final vote will turn on. It isn't funded by default.
Donate →Most people don't know this is being decided right now. Share this page. Talk about the ocean that isn't yet loud.
Share →A funding and partnership opportunity to shape the international standards for the world's first underwater internet — before it becomes irreversible.
QOSI is raising $5 million to fully fund the technical development, scientific documentation, counter-proposal preparation, and advocacy necessary to ensure a bio-friendly architecture becomes the adopted standard. The ocean whose future this work is protecting produces half of Earth's atmospheric oxygen, sustains a substantial portion of the planet's climate stability, and is home to some of the most sophisticated minds in the living world. The cost of getting this standard wrong will be measured in centuries.
Use of funds includes technical research and counter-proposal development; compensation for scientists and engineers currently working without pay; travel and sustained engagement at the standards meetings where decisions are made through relationship; formal environmental impact analysis and bio-friendly architecture specifications; strategic immersion experiences — including potential in-water encounters with cetaceans in Mo'orea — ensuring the people whose votes will determine this standard have met, in the water, the animals their decisions will affect; as well as ongoing public communications and coalition-building.
The highest-leverage near-term opportunity is a time-bound request for the upcoming Paris technical workshop. $50K is needed to get the team to Paris in June to submit the proposal for bio-friendly standards.
QOSI is equally interested in partnerships with organizations whose expertise, networks, or platforms can advance the work. Partnerships of particular value include scientific institutions and research collaborations, conservation organizations with standards-body engagement experience, cultural and Indigenous-led initiatives including alignment with the He Whakaputanga Moana movement, communications and media partners, legal and policy expertise in rights-of-nature frameworks and international environmental governance, and in-kind support across technical, legal, and communications capacities.
We welcome introductions. Many of the most significant moves in ocean conservation have begun with one trusted person sharing the right document with the right peer at the right moment.
Once standards are ratified, they shape global technology deployment for decades. The cost of changing the path before ratification is a fraction of the cost of remediation afterward — and remediation may not be possible once the infrastructure is in place.
At the same time, a historic alignment is building. The He Whakaputanga Moana declaration, signed in March 2024 by Indigenous leaders of New Zealand, Tahiti, Tonga, the Cook Islands, Hawaiʻi, and Rapanui, recognizes whales as legal persons with an inherent right to a healthy acoustic environment. The proposed UIoT, as currently specified, would violate that right at planetary scale.
The scientific community producing the most advanced cetacean communication research — Project CETI, the Earth Species Project, the University of St Andrews — is in direct alignment with this declaration. The scientific case, the ethical case, and the strategic case converge on the same conclusion: this is the moment to act.
An ocean alive — whales calling across deep water, swells rolling, distant bubbles, the small clicks of dolphins. The soundscape we still have, for now.