“Fathom” is only secondarily about whales. This is not one of those nature documentaries with breathtaking footage of animal lifecycles. It’s the story of two scientists who study whales, and it accompanies them on two separate but related field studies. Like other recent science documentaries, “The Edge of All We Know” and “Particle Fever,” it’s also about the very nature of the scientific method and the value of empiricism and of knowledge itself.Fathom 2021 Movie Download.
While the questions it raises are timeless, they are particularly urgent now, when accusations like “fake news” and “alternative facts” are lobbed by all sides and disinformation disseminated by shady internet sources goes viral before it can be verified. American acoustic ecologist Michelle Fournet is on a mission to “fool a whale” by lowering speakers into the water in Hobart Bay, Alaska, transmitting whale songs to see if she can receive an answer. If this sounds a bit like the end of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” you’ve got the idea. She believes she has identified a sound she endearingly calls a “whup” as the whale version of “Hello,” and she thinks she can prove it by seeing how a particular whale responds, how his or her “whups” vary after hearing her recording.
A previous effort did not go well due to a technology failure. The recording “made it sound like a humpback on helium.” She and her colleagues, all women, are hoping this time it will go better, but she admits that “the study has a high probability of failure.”On the other end of the Pacific, in French Polynesia, bioacoustics specialist Ellen Garland from Scotland’s University of St. Andrews is studying the cultural transmission, vocal learning, and function of humpback whale song, “measuring their communications over space and time.” While Fournet is listening to “whups,” Garland is tracking the way that the “rhythm, timed breathing, rhyming, repetition, hours of patterns within patterns” humpback whale songs go viral, always west to east, from one part of the world to another.