May, 2009

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Navy “Sparkle” and Propaganda – Evironmental “lawfare” threatens National Security

Saturday, May 30th, 2009

noiseA vaguely academic article published in  the “National Maritime Foundation: Advancing India’s Maritime Interests.” argues that environmental groups are actually agencies set up by adversarial governments to hobble the Navy’s readiness capabilities through environmental “lawfare.”

see: http://www.maritimeindia.org/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=166

I’m sure that the US Navy has an editorial board that weighs the degree of “sparkle” in the pieces they circulate to foreign publications. “Sparkle” being a term used by “intelligence” folks to frame predatory journalism; how much ‘lie’ you can infuse in a piece to influence readers in some particular way. The piece quoted smells highly of this. India readers are not going to question the implied enmity between the US and Russia or China, they will continue to see the US as “hero” being attacked from within by nefarious forces like NRDC and the Humane Society.

While this article was published in a foreign military publication, we are not exempt from military propaganda here at home – even in the academic circles of professional scientific conferences.

Back a couple of years ago Secretary of the Navy Donald Winter presented a PowerPoint slide show on the impacts of Navy sonar on marine life. In his presentation there was a slide that compares with relative dot sizes how many marine mammals are killed in fishing operations (Big Giant dot) with how many have been killed by sonar (only 37 – represented by this itty-bitty dot).

The actual numbers are much more than disputable because the 37  moralities they chose to represent were the stranded beaked whales from the Bahamas and from the Canarias – that due to necropsies were indisputably linked to acoustic trauma. The thousands more animals that happen to wash up on shore coincident to a Naval maneuvers are not represented on the slide because they are considered “anecdotal.”

Whale hearing specilist Darlene Ketten pulled this zinger slide out again last summer at the Paris Acoustics08 conference. I took her to task on this; both the disputability of the slides numbers as well as the question of its pedegree, to which she mumbled something about feeling like she was in a French Surrealist film (Cocteau, no doubt).

But the slide has legs, and showed up again last week at the Acoustics Society Meeting, held in Portland. This time it was in the presentation for the Marine Mammal Noise Exposure Criteria presentation – at a session I was hosting.  I did let the presenter know that the slide seriously pollutes the scientific integrity of the rest of the work. But being that the work is funded largely by the US Navy, I guess the “quid-pro-quo” for the funding is that the slide needs to get some screen time.

Along with the slide is the text (also used by Winter and Ketten) that all of the money “wasted on litigation” could be much better spent on bio-acoustic impacts research. Of course without the litigation posed by environmental NGO’s such as NRDC and the Humane Society, it is unlikely that any money would be allocated to research on bio-acoustic impacts because the situation would not be perceived as a “threat to national security.”  And so it goes…

Posted in Navy Noise | No Responses »

Minke Whales harassed by Navy Sonar

Wednesday, May 27th, 2009
Photo Lewis Drysdale

Photo Lewis Drysdale

Yet another unfortunate event involving whales and mid-frequency sonar; two minke whales were seen “porpoising” at high speeds in waters where military operations were taking place. Observers also heard extremely loud sonar concurrent to the sightings.

Minke whales are the smallest of the baleen whales, reaching a bit over 30 ft. in length. Porpoising is a shallow and fast skipping across the top of the water, given to porpoises and dolphins, not 11 ton baleen whales.

It is probable that these animals were keeping as close to, and above the water surface to keep their hearing either out of harms way, or near the surface where some attenuation is afforded. (This is similar to the protective strategy used by the orcas during the Haro Strait incident in 2004).

The article also mentions a decrease in population over the years, though the sonar correlation is only insinuated.

For the complete article see: http://www.wildlifeextra.com/go/news/whales-sonar009.html#cr

This news was sent to us by OCR Board member and Acoustic Ecologists Jim Cummings. (See: www.acousticecology.org )

More sad news about our complex relationship with the sea.

Posted in Navy Noise, Noise Pollution | No Responses »

Report from the May 2009 Acoustics Society meeting

Monday, May 25th, 2009
Density of two months of large commercial vessel traffic in the sanctuary, with peak densities seen in the shipping lanes Density of two months of large commercial vessel traffic in the sanctuary, with peak densities seen in the shipping lanes

Density of two months of large commercial vessel traffic in the sanctuary, with peak densities seen in the shipping lanes Density of two months of large commercial vessel traffic in the sanctuary, with peak densities seen in the shipping lanes

“Thrilling” is not a word I thought I would ever use in describing an Acoustical Society meeting, but there were moments last week that bordered on just that. Driving this is an intersection of rapidly increasing computer processing power and advancing sensor technologies – put in the hands of some of the nimble intellects that are making up the current crop of bio-acoustic post-docs.

Over the five days of the meeting there were many sessions on “Passive Acoustic Monitoring” (PAM) which presented many of the aspects of putting sensors in the ocean, collecting the data, and then making sense of it all. In practice this often means collecting the vocalizations of whales or dolphins over a period of time and watching the population dynamics change as a consequence of environmental conditions.

The output of these studies can be time-compressed animations of the peregrinations of dolphin schools or whale pods,[i] or in the case of Chris Clark, the acoustical impacts of ship traffic on humpback, fin and right whales.[ii] Dr. Clark’s animated display was a stunning “spatial-temporal” graphic of the changes in the hearing and communication range of these three whale species as a cargo ship passed over their habitat. I will make these graphics available on the OCR website once I get them from Chris, but meanwhile you can find out about the program here: http://stellwagen.noaa.gov/science/passive_acoustics_noise.html

Another telling presentation by Manolo Costellote came from his PAM study of the seasonal migration of fin whales in the Mediterranean Sea over a three year period. During one of the seasons there happened to be a concurrent seismic airgun survey. The monitoring clearly demonstrated that the whales avoided their traditional winter feeding areas throughout and even after of the survey. This indicates the acoustical impacts of airgun surveys reach over hundreds of kilometers for these animals.

Of course Manolo wanted to know where the surveys were taking place, and something about the sizes of the airgun arrays. He managed to locate the company doing the work, but they were predictably uncooperative. Not to be discouraged, he did a little sleuth work and found a “blog” of one of the crew members, which included the entire equipment list; airgun capacities, photographs of the ship, and pretty much everything he needed to calibrate his findings except for the exact locations of the survey (which he derived through some clever data evaluation).

It is work like this which may eventually put the current practices of airgun surveys “on the ropes” until the oil industry can find more benign ways of locating offshore oil.

Many other breakthroughs were presented and new ideas introduced over the course of the week across the field of acoustics. While overall the meeting was still pretty high on the “pencil-pocket” index, our field of marine bioacoustics is going through a thrilling sea change.

Stay tuned!

[i] Kaitlin E. Frasier “Acoustic tracking of whistling dolphins offshore of Southern California”

[ii] Christopher W. Clark “Result ad insights from operational monitoring networks”

Posted in Noise Pollution, Ocean Life | No Responses »

Report from the Dept. of Fisheries and Oceans workshop

Thursday, May 14th, 2009
Maurice Ewing towing and airgun array

Maurice Ewing towing and airgun array

Spending the last two days in the company of geophysicists, marine mammologists, petroleum engineers and policy makers was much less grueling than I had anticipated. But the degree of collegiality was uncharacteristic of these affairs – to a point of being downright pleasant.

The purpose of the meeting was to craft a “Mitigations Practices” document for seismic airgun surveys to minimize their acoustic and behavioral impacts on marine mammals. The final product will be a synthesis of our discussions outlining recommended practices and standards for “Marine Mammal Observers,” emerging technologies, survey planning and design, and passive monitoring for marine animals.

While only four of us (out of 40) were from the environmental NGO community, it was comforting to be among a crowd of people – most of whom owe their living to fossil fuels – who were also sincerely concerned about the impacts of their industry on marine habitat. They were quite agreeable to contributing to a document wherein every line put more constraints on their work.

Of course everything must be put in some context; and while each sentence added costs to seismic surveys, with few exceptions the economic beneficiaries of these cost increases were the geophysicists, marine mammologists, and petroleum engineers in the room.

This situation was punctuated twice over the course of the workshop. On the first day it was when Jim Cummings (www.acousticecology.org) delivered a paper that highlighted the behavioral impacts of seismic exploration on marine mammals – pointing out that the noise might do more that just bother or damage animals within a prescribed distance from the surveys. He pointed out that the noise also interfered with their foraging (feeding) efficiency well outside of the “safe exclusion zone” set by common mitigation practices.

On the second day things got a little hot when Dr. Lindy Weilgart (Dalhousie University) suggested that a “no action alternative” be used when the risks of environmental damage mandated that surveys not take place.

So back to the context: While we in the environmental NGO community were pleased to be invited to the table, by participating we had already accepted the inevitability of seismic surveys.

One of the many responses I received when I announced that I would be attending the workshop was from Mac Hawley, who quipped that “mitigation” and “seismic surveys” were an oxymoron.  I concurred stating that “mitigation” and “airguns” don’t belong in the same sentence unless the word “solar” is also included.

At the end of the day it was not a total giveaway. Dr. Weilgart did get precautionary language into the document. Jim Cummings did get some wording about broader considerations for behavioral and synergistic impacts. I wrote a piece on “Objectives and Outcomes” to clarify the fact that the document was not designed to “make sure that survey operators met the established guidelines;” rather it was to make sure that their practices, above all, are performed with the overarching objective of conserving marine life.

Posted in Fossil Fuel Industry, Noise Pollution | 1 Response »

This little blue marble

Friday, May 1st, 2009
Nasa Photo

Nasa Photo

OCR Advisory Board member and ocean champion J. Nichols and “Her Deepness” Dr. Sylvia Earle have founded an organization predicted on a delightful premise. The organization is called “Bluemarbles.org” from the metaphor of the earth seen from space being likened to a blue marble.

The premise involves gifting blue marbles to other people with a suggestion that they do something nice for the ocean. This could be not using a plastic bag, or walking downtown (as opposed to driving), or not using chemicals in your garden, or not buying something that was shipped across the Pacific, or eating wild-caught salmon, or using gray water to flush your toilet, or…well almost anything regenerative that we do will benefit the ocean, because the ocean is connected to everything.

This is part of the idea. And as you pass these blue marbles around – if it works as it should, you may handle two, three or a dozen marbles between now and World Oceans Day on June 11, 2010. This will give you and the dozen other folks you hand marbles to a chance to talk about the ocean and this beautiful blue jewel we live on surrounded by an infinite velvet-black sky.

You can get hooked in here:  http://www.bluemarbles.org/ where you can find marble suppliers (90% of all marbles are made from recycled glass; most are made here in the USA). The site also has some other ways to participate.

For those of you in Marin County, I will be receiving a 5# bag of earth marbles. I would be glad to give you a handful or two. Just e-mail or call me. For others outside of the SF Bay area, you can either order some or just get outside and sooner or later someone will hand you one.

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Response »