Sonar, Seismic Surveys, Lawsuits And Voters Make Loud Noises

The LFA may be stopped by a lawsuit against the U.S. Navy and NMFS filed in federal district court in San Francisco on 7 August, to block deployment of the Surveillance Towed Array Sensor System Low Frequency Active (LFA) sonar system. CSI was extremely pleased to be invited to join the intentionally small coalition filing the suit, led by Natural Resources Defense Council, and also including the Humane Society of the U.S., the League for Coastal Protection, and the Ocean Futures Society and its president, Jean-Michel Cousteau. The international firm of Morrison & Foerster is representing the plaintiffs. Whales Alive! readers have followed the LFA since October 1996, as the controversy grew over the LFA's impacts on cetaceans and other marine life. Joel Reynolds, senior attorney and director of NRDC's Marine Mammals Protection Project, said in announcing the suit, that: "One of the truly disturbing aspects of this system is its unprecedented power and geographic scope. If the Navy deploys LFA, tens of thousands of square miles of ocean habitat would be saturated with extremely loud and dangerous sound. The Navy has illegally been given a blank check to deploy LFA in 75 percent of the world's oceans." Dr. Naomi Rose, marine mammal scientist for the Humane Society of the United States said that: "From a scientific point of view, there is very little question that, given the right set of circumstances, active sonar can kill marine life. The frightening thing about LFA is that we're flying blind, because the Navy has never seriously applied the lessons from previous strandings to its LFA system." The long planned lawsuit was triggered in July by a NMFS decision to issue the Navy a permit allowing the global deployment of LFA, and will challenge that deployment under the Marine Mammal Protection Act, the Endangered Species Act and the National Environmental Policy Act. For detailed information please see http://www.nrdc.org/.

Whales and Eggs have something in common, according to decision makers in the U.S. Navy. Just as a few eggs have to be broken to make an omelet, a few whales have to die if the Navy is to maintain its mission. In other words, even as it becomes painfully obvious that whales may be dying far more often than anyone imagined, because of mid-range sonars in common use in navies worldwide, those navies will use their sonar as required. However, the British Royal Navy recently announced several constraints in sonar operations, apparently respecting concerns for impacts to marine life.

20 beaked whales stranded or were found dead at sea beginning on 24 September, on the coast of Fuerteventura and Lanzarote in the Canary Islands. Individuals of three species, Cuvier's, Blainville's and Gervais' beaked whales were involved, concurrent with the 11 nation NATO "Neo Tapon 2002" naval exercise that was said to be operating a joint force of 58 surface vessels, six submarines, and 30 aircraft between the Canaries and Gibraltar. Some of the force was operating near Fuerteventura when the whales came ashore. At first the U.S. antisubmarine frigate De Wert was listed as participating, but later reports listed the U.S. destroyer Mahan. The NATO force complied with the Canary Islands government's immediate request to stop all maneuvers. The Environmental Department coordinated the stranding response and investigation, and the Society for the Study of Cetaceans in the Canary Archipelago assisted with the initial reintroduction of at least four live whales, although without identification tags. Necropsies showed the whales generally to be healthy, with fresh squid and crustaceans as evidence that they were feeding just before the event. Special investigations of the heads of six Cuvier's beaked whales carried out at the laboratory of the Faculty of Veterinary indicated ear and brain trauma consistent with trauma from acoustical impacts. Although similar strandings have since been correlated with other naval maneuvers using midrange sonar, the relationship was only identified after a similar tragedy in the Bahamas in 2000. Midrange sonar appears to kill whales only under particular environmental circumstances, where the combination can tear apart the whale's inner ear and brain tissue, leading to hemorrhaging, disorientation and death. Sensors and computers can predict these circumstances as they routinely generate integrated environmental models designed to maximize sensor and weapon efficiency during an operation. Did the model predict a situation similar to the Bahamas? Did NATO exercise commanders consider the potential? Was there any plan to alter the operation?

Retrospective analysis after the Bahamas event tallied the following known mass strandings of beaked whales in the Canary Islands, most of which coincided with known naval exercises: 10-12 on 5 February 1985; three on 1 June 1986; three on 4 July 1987; three beaked whales and two other species on 25 November 1988; at least 20 from three beaked whale species on 19 October 1989; and two on 11 December 1991. Beaked whales have remained poorly known to science simply because they remain hard to find, but as some species seem to have very large ranges there must have been reasonable if scattered populations before sonar. The well-studied population in the Bahamas vanished after March 2000, and beaked whales are not known to migrate. There is no way to know the total kill in September's event. Within a few months the scientists in the Canary Islands will tell us if any beaked whales remain to be seen in an area they frequented before September. Science may someday tell us enough about these whales to at least avoid killing them. But if we are faced with the awful reality that beaked whales over a wide area may be killed by midrange military sonar, which will we choose, sonar or whales? There may be an option, if the sonar-using navies will use their environmental models to predict the whale killing conditions, and modify the operations to accommodate them.

The National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (NEPA) became the latest fundamental environmental law under attack by the Bush administration (See the July 2002 Whales Alive!), when the Attorney General in August argued that NEPA did not apply to any human activities beyond territorial waters, 3 nautical miles from shore. The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) countered that NEPA governs all activity within the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), 200 miles offshore. The Court agreed, citing a 1993 court decision that NEPA applied to a U.S. program in Antarctica. The lawsuit was brought by NRDC against NOAA Fisheries (NMFS) for permitting the U.S. Navy to conduct several Littoral Warfare Advanced Development (LWAD) tests with inadequate environmental assessments, as required by NEPA. The White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), prompted by Navy assertions, is apparently supporting the Attorney General. It's all politics: under the Clinton administration the CEQ and Justice Department wanted NEPA to apply worldwide. LWAD tests assess the combat effectiveness of a variety of active acoustics in relatively shallow water environment, but no one can predict the real effect on the habitat and marine life. To their credit, the NMFS NE Region refused to permit a LWAD test after particularly obnoxious efforts by the Navy to proceed without regard for the procedures. The Navy is afraid of public scrutiny, knowledge, review and accountability for far more than just the LWAD tests, and feeling threatened by bad publicity and the strengthening cases against LWAD and LFA, may have manipulated or accentuated the administration assault to gut decades of environmental laws. The salient question now is how can we hold against these assaults until there is an election? The answer is to make every elected official aware now of what allowing, much less abetting attacks on environmental laws will mean to voters. Tell them how you feel, and that you won't forget.

Seismic surveys in the Gulf of Mexico came under new mitigation procedures in August. As many as 600 sperm whales hunt the 1000 m deep waters along the edge of the continental shelf, where continuing lease sales offer opportunities for oil exploration, requiring seismic surveys. Predictably, the oil industry complained publicly about the ensuing costs of the U.S. Minerals Management Service requirements, but quietly congratulated themselves for lobbying successfully against the original proposal contained in a biological opinion by the fisheries division of NOAA that threatened to shut down seismic exploration if whales were a further distance from the array, or at night and during other periods of limited visibility. The end result is said to be similar to mitigations used in the North Sea, with a limited exclusion zone and ramp up of airgun array noises. The North Sea mitigations have not been verified to limit impacts on sperm whales. In another "victory" any free hand can be delegated to be the "observer" until late October, when "trained" observers have to have completed a NOAA-approved course in whale spotting. The mitigations are supposed to visually confirm for at least 30 minutes that no whales are too close, then acoustically "push" sperm whales out of the zone by slowly increasing the loudness of the shots, which are like explosions, and then keep up the din into the night or low visibility when observers couldn't see whales anyway. As long as the noise doesn't drop below 160 dB operations can continue, so the net effect will probably be more noise for longer periods. The industry ignored any potential that a prolonged, all night seismic session would have any negative effect on the whales finding food or staying together. While the industry fought any additional costs to them, they discounted every scientific concern for the costs to the whales. They decried non-supporting science as "faulty", yet relied upon "scientific research conducted last summer that suggests that seismic operations may not pose displacement problems for sperm whales". The cited research followed just one tagged sperm whale, which stayed in a surprisingly limited area the whale shared at one point with an operating seismic survey. The industry failed to include that the research data had not been worked up to show the whale's detailed response to the survey, just that the whale didn't leave altogether. Maybe that whale really needed to be there. CSI can cite examples of individual whales putting up with almost anything, right up until they die from it. NOAA is drafting a new set of mitigation measures for federal lease sales in 2003-05 that would supersede this initial proposal. Please stay alert for the Federal Register Notice for public comment, and ensure that the whales are better protected.