It is with deep gratitude (and a bit of surprise) that I look over the time horizon to realize that OCR has “been in business” for almost seven years. Much has been accomplished since our first clean (but stiff) website…
Author: mstocker
Oceans of noise
It was a bit over a decade ago that a catastrophic whale stranding event brought the public’s attention to the fact that noise in the ocean could be lethal to marine mammals. The particular stranding was a consequence of mid-frequency…
Ultrasound Ocean Noises Pose Risk to Marine Life
Noise pollution has now become one of the common themes of human-generated impacts on the ocean. Shipping noise, military sonar, and seismic airgun surveys are increasingly becoming part of the public discussion in marine conservation. These noises are easy for…
International conference on ocean noise pollution
It was once a popular belief that the ocean was “the silent realm.” This was largely due to the fact that humans are poorly adapted to hearing underwater, and marine animals don’t appear to have “ears” that look anything like…
The Effects of Oil and Gas Activities in the Arctic
I’ve just submitted our comments to the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) Supplemental Draft Environmental Impacts Statement (SDEIS) on the impacts of Oil and Gas operations in the Arctic. This is a “Supplemental” DEIS because it is built on a…
A foot in the door on seismic airgun surveys
On Friday a group of conservation interests lead by NRDC’s Michael Jasney landed a milestone decision on airgun survey regulation in the Gulf of Mexico. Seismic airgun survey – used to find oil and gas deposits are the one of…
Healthy Ocean = Sustainable Planet panel discussion
On Thursday June 13 I will be joining Ocean Conservancy’s Julia Roberson and fisheries conservationist Ken Hinman in a panel discussion moderated by Mark Spalding, President of the Ocean Foundation. The discussion will be available as a webcast at 4…
The Measure of Things
Quite a few years back we committed to assemble a compendium of “auditory thresholds” or hearing sensitivities of fish and marine mammals. The objective was to plot data from each family – fish, pinnepeds, dolphins, and porpoises on their own respective…