One of the primary threats the month-long series of exercises were designed to address comes from quiet diesel-engine submarines, which national security experts say North Korea, Iran and other potential adversarial nations possess. The best way to detect something as quiet as a submarine running nearly entirely on battery power – as opposed to a noisy nuclear sub – is with high-intensity active sonar, which sends out pulses of mid-frequency sound as loud as a rocket blast underwater.
The general consensus, with which courts over the past decade have largely agreed, says high-intensity mid-frequency sonar can kill whales and dolphins. The National Marine Fisheries Services – part of the National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration – explicitly allows Navy sonar tests and training exercises to result in the deaths of specific numbers of whales and dolphins as long as they have a negligible impact to the population.
One of the primary threats the month-long series of exercises were designed to address comes from quiet diesel-engine submarines, which national security experts say North Korea, Iran and other potential adversarial nations possess. The best way to detect something as quiet as a submarine running nearly entirely on battery power – as opposed to a noisy nuclear sub – is with high-intensity active sonar, which sends out pulses of mid-frequency sound as loud as a rocket blast underwater.
The general consensus, with which courts over the past decade have largely agreed, says high-intensity mid-frequency sonar can kill whales and dolphins. The National Marine Fisheries Services – part of the National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration – explicitly allows Navy sonar tests and training exercises to result in the deaths of specific numbers of whales and dolphins as long as they have a negligible impact to the population.
It’s under an exception to the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972 that NOAA authorized the Navy this year in the waters around Hawaii to inadvertently harass thousands of marine mammals and kill up to 20 whales and dolphins among 10 different species during the course of its sonar exercises, including RIMPAC. (See attached)
Similar authorizations exist for training grounds bordering the entire west, east and gulf coasts of America including the Mariana Islands and Alaska, several of which the Navy is in the process of expanding.
High-intensity sonar appears to cause bleeding from the head in some whales found stranded. It can also cause confusion and mass stranding into shallow bays. For whales that dive deep for food, biologists believe sonar may cause them to repeatedly dive, creating a severe case of decompression sickness that leads to death.
RIMPAC concluded August 1 without a controversial whale stranding, unlike the last RIMPAC in 2008. That doesn’t mean, however, there were no marine mammals harmed or killed by the sonar used by the U.S. and other navies, says Marsha Green, PhD, founder of the Ocean Mammal Institute and one of the first to challenge the U.S. Navy on its sonar use in the mid-1990s.
“There aren’t that many whales and dolphins dying from sonar, compared to entanglements from fishing lines for instance, but the problem is we don’t have a clue,” Green says. “Most are going to sink to the bottom or be eaten by sharks and you’re never going to know.”
It’s been 10 years since the Navy last admitted in the Bahamas that sonar caused a whale stranding, while environmental groups point to at least seven strandings in U.S. waters since then and others worldwide.
Despite the Navy spending $20 million each year – reportedly half of all marine mammal research globally – through the Office of Naval Research, much of the science about how sonar affects whales is still widely debated.
“Most of the time when marine mammals strand, despite the best scientific evidence, no one can really tell what causes them to strand,” says Ken Hess, Navy chief of Naval Operations Energy and Environmental Readiness Division. “We have not seen any cases (since the Bahamas) where we can scientifically show that the Navy’s activities could have affected the marine mammals.”
The lack of whale strandings at an event such as RIMPAC could mean the Navy is getting better at mitigating its ocean noise impact, Hess says. “Ever since the stranding in the Bahamas the Navy began to take a look at this and try to better understand what we could do to protect marine mammals and implement protection measures that we feel have been pretty successful.”
Sonar comes primarily from ships at mid-frequencies up to 235 decibels or from helicopters that can strafe an area with sonar from above. The Navy is also looking into expanding its use of low-frequency sonar sometimes referred to as Continuous Active Sonar that can cover greater distances and may have a lower impact on marine mammals.
But Green and others who’ve pushed the Navy to address the links between sonar and whale strandings still aren’t buying it.
“When author affiliations were used…conservation-funded literature was always cited as showing an effect of noise, while military-funded literature was 2.34 times more likely than other literature to be cited concluding no effect,” the report found. When author affiliations were not used, “there was no statistically-significant bias.”
“This indicates that much of the bias in military-funded literature was in work carried out at military institutions, rather than in studies funded by the military but carried out at universities and other institutions,” according to the paper.
The Office of Naval Research was proud to announce in November 2009 that a Navy-funded study by a team at San Diego State University and UC San Diego suggested whales might have more difficulty hearing sonar than scientists thought.
“The study suggests mid-frequency active sonar sounds are largely filtered, or ‘muffled,’ before reaching the animal’s ears. The findings also suggest that higher frequencies used by whales to hunt prey are heard at amplified levels without any dampening,” according to an ONR press release.
Mark Matsunaga, Navy environmental public affairs officer for the U.S. Pacific Fleet in Hawaii, stressed that two dozen marine mammals strand on beaches in Hawaii each year and that there’s still much about the ocean and whale behavior that scientists don’t fully understand.
“People need to understand how little we know about sound and marine mammals,” said Matsunaga, a native Hawaiian and former newspaper reporter in Honolulu. “Unfortunately, a lot of people are very quick to point a finger at sonar when the science doesn’t back that up. There is still so much to be learned. There’s stuff the native Hawaiians knew that has been lost.”
For many biologists, the science is clear at least in the most extreme scenarios. In Cuvier’s beaked whales that dive deep for food, high-intensity sonar can possibly cause them to dive repeatedly or drive them away from feeding areas. For other species, sonar generally confuses marine mammals that depend on sound to communicate and search for food. It can disrupt feeding habits and even put up a blanket of noise, driving them into shallow waters. Affected species include Melon-headed whales, Bottlenose dolphins and Striped dolphins.
NOAA requires a series of mitigation measures – many the result of lawsuits – that include powering down active sonar by specific decibels, depending on how far away animals are visible, to listening for them underwater with passive sonar and waiting until they are no longer heard for a certain number of minutes. However, the findings and requirements imposed by NOAA, like much of the science related to the effects of sonar on marine mammals, are subject to considerable debate.
Jim Lecky, director of NOAA Fisheries Protected Resources, says determining the exact number of animals that might be harmed is always difficult. “There’s a lot of machination of numbers and theory that goes into that so there’s pretty big room for criticism,” Lecky says. “At the end of the day, we have a fairly good understanding of what the mechanisms are for injury and we think that for some species we have good mitigation measures.”
The decade-long effort by conservation groups to limit the Navy’s use of underwater sonar culminated in a November 2008 U.S. Supreme Court ruling. By a 6-3 decision, justices struck down increased mitigation steps imposed by the lower courts in California, saying they jeopardized national security.
“The Navy has not at all been shy about talking about the national security importance of what they are doing,” says Paul Achitoff, attorney for Earthjustice in Hawaii who challenged the Navy over a series of training exercises in 2008 around the same time as the Supreme Court ruling. “Before our lawsuit, the Navy had a list of mitigation measures. It’s a long list but it all boils down to virtually nothing more than some sailors standing on deck with binoculars. As soon as the judge’s order in our case expired, they went back to doing what they had been doing before.
Immediately following the lawsuit, which ended in January 2009, two whales and thousands of dead fish washed up on a beach in Kauai. Green says she filed a Freedom of Information Act request to find out what happened, but the Navy never responded, which is against the law.
“There were scientists doing research off the island of Kauai,” Green says. “They made scientists leave the area so it could have been more than sonar.”
Navy officials are now taking part in ongoing talks with NOAA and the Natural Resources Defense Council on further mitigation, while at the same time the Navy is proposing to build a new training range in an area that infuriates environmentalists.
Conservationists were shocked in 2009 to learn the Navy planned an Undersea Warfare Training Range outside Jacksonville, Florida about 30 miles from the only birthing grounds of the North Atlantic Right whale, of which there are only about 350 left.
“How can you pick a worse place?” says Green, whose group along with several others including Earthjustice in Washington, D.C., and the NRDC are suing the federal government to stop it. “They don’t use any common sense,” Green says. “Most of the environmentalists would be willing to work with them if they are willing to be reasonable.”
The federal government hadn’t acknowledged Navy sonar could, in fact, kill whales until attorneys with the NRDC and others sued the federal government more than 10 years ago. Attorneys argued successfully that the Navy had broken environmental law for decades without account. And while the documents produced by the Navy now run more than 1,000 pages each, environmental law attorneys often find them inadequate, says Michael Jasny, senior policy analyst for NRDC in British Columbia, Canada.
“They run a lot of pages and they seem like they present a lot of information, but every court that has looked at the Navy’s environmental compliance documentation has found it deeply flawed and inadequate,” Jasny says. The same goes for the Navy’s mitigation steps, he continues. “There hasn’t been any change this year to existing Navy exercises, which is of great concern to us.”
Green and Achitoff don’t hold much hope for the current negotiations with NOAA, Navy and NRDC. Green participated in a similar three-year effort with the Navy and environmental groups that ended in 2006 with panel members quitting in disgust and the Navy accused of influencing scientists.
Green is also part of the Ocean Noise Coalition, which for the past eight years went to the UN Conference on Oceans and the Law of the Sea where, she says, ocean noise was a hot topic at its latest meeting in June.
High-intensity active sonar is one in a multitude of artificial sounds – mostly engine noise from container ships – that’s made the oceans roughly a thousand times louder than a century ago, she says from her summer home in Maine. “The Navy has been working very hard at the UN to keep noise from being considered a pollutant. We don’t talk much about whales and sonar because it’s a volatile issue. But when we talk about noise from ships and air guns from oil drilling, everyone pays attention.”
[Update] VIDEO Interview: “You’re killing me”: How whales and dolphins sacrifice for national security
For further reading:
Wade 2009 — Report about research bias.
NOAA_letter… — Letter detailing the renewed negotiations with NOAA, NRDC and Navy.
