[Newspoetry] Wired News :Naval Noise: Whale of a Problem

Tue Jul 30 11:34:59 CDT 2002

A note from William:

   Save the whales.

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 From Wired News, available online at:
http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,54077,00.html

Naval Noise: Whale of a Problem  
By Noah Shachtman  

2:00 a.m. July 25, 2002 PDT 

The U.S. Navy wants to keep tabs on the seas. But it's facing a whale
of a problem: The technologies it says it needs to spy on enemy subs are so loud that they can ruin the lives of nearby leviathans, which rely on their ears like we use our eyes.  

Next Monday, lawyers representing the Navy and the National Resources
Defense Council (NRDC) will square off in U.S. District Court over a program that tests new sub-detection techniques in coastal waters -- the most heavily populated part of the oceans.   
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The technologies operating in these crowded neighborhoods can be
ear-splittingly loud -- more than 238 decibels, according to Navy test plans. That's 4.3 billion times as loud as the sounds that can cause people pain, estimates William Wilgus, director of The Public Cause Network. It's about the equivalent of a Saturn rocket lifting off.  

This noise can have disastrous effects on whales in the area. One of
the systems being tested is an adaptation of the "53 C" active sonar, which was responsible for the March 2000 deaths of at least eight whales in the Bahamas. Other technologies have been known to wreck whales' abilities to feed, mate and communicate with one another for thousands of square miles around, said Michael Jasny, an NRDC senior policy analyst.  

"From a biological point of view, it's one of the worst places you can
do these tests," Jasny continued, "because dozens of marine mammal species are found only in coastal waters, and because many others have their feeding, mating and breeding grounds there."  

The NRDC is demanding that the testing program -- known as "LWAD,"
short for Littoral Warfare Advanced Development -- be stopped until a full-blown environmental review can be done, and environmental guidelines for LWAD can be set. The government is arguing, in turn, that it already is taking extraordinary measures to protect marine life, and that the NRDC's case should be dismissed.  

Alex Hill, the deputy manager of the LWAD program at the Office of
Naval Research, said the Navy is making "every effort to ensure there are no environmental effects" from the LWAD tests.  

"We prep for months before any test, and most of that is assessing the
environmental impact. While the test is on, the source ship is manned by marine mammal observers that stop the tests if there's impact on animal behavior in any way," he continued. "Right now, there are tests going on off the coast of Scotland. And they have shut down operations multiple times every day to let mammals leave the area."  

"Some in the Navy put a lot of stock in their responsibilities as
stewards of the marine environment," Jasny replied. "But during this administration, those that want to stonewall and disregard the consequences of their environmental activities are having the upper hand."  

This legal melee is the latest round in a nearly endless fight between
the Navy and environmentalists.  

"The Navy has a much bigger environmental problem than the Army or the
Air Force. If you take a look at the U.S. military facilities with the highest environmental impact questions, it's largely Navy," John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, said.  

The biggest battles have been over the use of active sonar, which
sends out massive waves of sound to locate targets. Such equipment was blamed for a 1996 mass stranding of beaked whales on the west coast of Greece, as well as the 2000 Bahamas beaching.  

Just last week, the Navy won a controversial exemption from the Marine
Mammal Protection Act to run a powerful low-frequency active sonar, despite the potential impact on whales' hearing.   

During the Cold War, the U.S. Navy largely relied on passive sonar --
little more than microphones dropped in the water -- to quietly listen for Soviet subs.  

"That changed when we stopped hunting for Red October," Pike said.
"Now we're trying to detect little Iranian electric submarines lurking about in the Persian Gulf. And they're hard to find. They're very quiet, and they operate in coastal waters, which are a very acoustically complex environment.  

"Before, the Navy was afraid to use active sonar, because the noise
would compromise a ship's location. But the Iranians know we're there anyway."  

This shift to active sonar is making the seas a noisier place. But
it's only the continuation of a trend that's been going on for a century and a half.  

"There was almost no man-made noise in the ocean before 1850," said
Christopher Fox, a researcher at the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory.  

The proliferation of steamships in the mid-19th century changed all
that. And now the ocean -- once as quiet as the North American wilderness before Columbus came -- is "as noisy as the middle of New York City," Fox said.  

Some of the most obnoxious noises come from oil and gas explorers,
which employ a kind of pressurized air gun into the ocean floor to listen for telltale signs of fossil fuel.  

"The sound from air guns operating off Nova Scotia completely
overwhelmed sensors I was using in the Azores (islands in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean), thousands of miles away," Fox said.  

Modified versions of those air guns are among the most prominent of
the technologies being tested in the $6 million per year LWAD program, which is halfway through an eight-year development cycle. 

Also being tried is a new breed of active sonars -- the Navy calls
them "multi-statics" -- that rely on sensors on as many as 15 different ships, as well as laser and optical-based detection systems.  

These "non-acoustic" technologies will be tested off the East Coast
next week if the NRDC doesn't stop the LWAD program in court. The air guns, active sonars and other noisy LWAD technologies are slated for tests in October, in waters around either Korea or Japan.   

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