LIFE ON EARTH

If you haven’t yet read this article on the AOL opening page about a mass dolphin stranding in Florida, it’s time to read it now. If you don’t have time to read it, I’ll summarize for you: 68 rough-toothed dolphins stranded themselves on the beach at Marathon, 20 of them have died, the rest are being taken to rehabilitation. This happened one day after a Navy submarine conducted operations in the ocean roughly 45 miles away from the site of the beaching.

To quote the article : "The beachings came a day after the USS Philadelphia conducted exercises off Key West, about 45 miles from Marathon. Navy officials refused to say whether the Groton, Conn.-based submarine used its sonar during a training exercise with Navy SEALs.

But naval ships emitting pulses of sound have been blamed for at least one mass beaching. Scientists surmise that sonar may disorient or scare marine mammals, causing them to surface too quickly and creating the equivalent of what divers know as the bends - when nitrogen is formed in tissue by sudden decompression, leading to hemorrhaging."

So, the Navy refuses to say whether it used sonar or not. Hmmmm, don’t you suppose if they hadn’t used it they’d be jumping at the chance to say so? Of course they used sonar. And the fact that sonar is damaging to marine wildlife is not news, and is no secret. I urge you also to visit the NRDC’s ocean wildlife site for this article, Protecting Whales from Dangerous Sonar. Conservation groups have been working on getting this stopped for quite some time, ever since they became aware of what was happening.

Again, if you don’t have the time to read the information on the links, I’ll put some of it in right here: (and I cut out the photo on purpose, not to steal bandwidth)

Active Sonar: How It Harms Marine Life

  LFA Victory Threatened

The ink was barely dry on the historic settlement limiting use of LFA sonar when ocean advocates were confronted with a new threat. In what Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) called the greatest single rollback of marine mammal protection in the last 30 years, the Bush administration pushed legislation through Congress that exempts the U.S. military from core provisions of the Marine Mammal Protection Act -- leaving the armed forces much freer to harm whales, dolphins and other marine mammals in the course of using high-intensity sonar and underwater explosives. Exemptions in hand, the administration is now trying to appeal the ruling limiting deployment of LFA sonar -- a hard-won court victory NRDC stands ready to defend.

Military active sonar works like a floodlight, emitting sound waves that sweep across tens or even hundreds of miles of ocean, revealing objects in their path. But that kind of power requires the use of extremely loud sound. Each loudspeaker in the LFA system's wide array, for example, can generate 215 decibels' worth -- sound as intense as that produced by a twin-engine fighter jet at takeoff. Some mid-frequency sonar systems can put out over 235 decibels, as loud as a Saturn V rocket at launch. One hundred miles from the LFA system, sound levels can approach 160 decibels, well beyond the Navy's own safety limits for humans.

Evidence of the harm such a barrage of sound can do began to surface in March 2000, when members of four different species of whales stranded themselves on beaches in the Bahamas after a U.S. Navy battle group used active sonar in the area. Investigators found that the whales were bleeding internally around their brains and ears. Although the Navy initially denied responsibility, the government's investigation established with virtual certainty that the strandings were caused by its use of active sonar. Since the incident, the area's population of Cuvier's beaked whales has all but disappeared, leading researchers to conclude that they either abandoned their habitat or died at sea.

The Bahamas, it turned out, was only the tip of an iceberg. Additional mass strandings and deaths associated with military activities and active sonar have occurred in Madeira (2000), Greece (1996), the U.S. Virgin Islands (1998, 1999), the Canary Islands (1985, 1988, 1989, 2002), and, most recently, the northwest coast of the United States (2003). And in July 2004 researchers uncovered an extraordinary concentration of whale strandings near Yokosuka, a major U.S. Navy base off the Pacific coast of Japan. The Navy's active sonar program appears to be responsible for many more whale strandings than had previously been imagined.

How does active sonar harm whales? According to a recent report in the journal Nature, animals that came ashore during one mass stranding had developed large emboli, or bubbles, in their organ tissue. The report suggested that the animals had suffered from something akin to a severe case of "the bends" -- the illness that can kill scuba divers who surface too quickly from deep water. The study supports what many scientists have long suspected: that the whales stranded on shore are only the most visible symptom of a problem affecting much larger numbers of marine life.

Researchers have found that many humpback whales cease singing when exposed to an LFA sonar signal that is hundreds of miles distant.
Photo: Bill Lawton / NMML

 

Other impacts, though more subtle, are no less serious. Marine mammals and many species of fish use sound to follow migratory routes, locate each other over great distances, find food and care for their young. Noise that undermines their ability to hear can threaten their ability to function and, over the long term, to survive. Naval sonar has been shown to alter the singing of humpback whales, an activity essential to the reproduction of this endangered species; to disrupt the feeding of orcas; and to cause porpoises and other species to leap from the water, or panic and flee. Over time, these effects could undermine the fitness of populations of animals, contributing to what prominent biologist Sylvia Earle has called "a death of a thousand cuts."Reining in LFA Sonar

Since 1994, when NRDC began investigating rumors that sound experiments were taking place off the California coast, LFA (Low-frequency Active) sonar has been of particular concern because of the enormous distances traveled by its intense blasts of sound. During testing off the California coast, noise from a single LFA system was detected across the breadth of the North Pacific. By the Navy's own estimates, even 300 miles from the source these sonic waves can retain an intensity of 140 decibels -- still a hundred times more intense than the noise aversion threshold for gray whales. Many scientists believe that blanketing the oceans with such deafening sound could harm entire populations of whales, dolphins and fish.

NRDC's decade-long campaign to expose the dangers of active sonar won a major victory in August 2003, when a federal court ruled illegal the Navy's plan to deploy LFA sonar through 75 percent of the world's oceans. On the heels of this ruling, the Navy agreed to limit use of the system to a fraction of the area originally proposed, and that use of LFA sonar will be guided by negotiated geographical limits and seasonal exclusions; conservationists believe this will protect critical habitat and whale migrations. None of the limits apply during war or heightened threat conditions; the Navy also retains the flexibility it needs for training exercises. The pact demonstrates that current law can safeguard both the environment and national security.

Could it possibly be that our Navy was not adhering to the federal court ruling established in August 2003? Which the Bush administration immediately began working to overthrow?

It’s for such things that I put in boring lengthy posts about anti-environment judges being reconsidered for federal bench appointments – these people havethe power to destroy our forests, oceans, air, and public lands. We are fighting for our lives here, ours and the lives of the rest of the planet. There is no cause more important than this one right now. If we lose this, nothing else is going to matter.