Overview
of Low Frequency Active Sonar
In February 1998, Dr. Marsha Green of Ocean Mammal
Institute alerted the Animal Welfare Institute (AWI) to a threat to
ocean life of almost unbelievable magnitude. Dr. Greene has studied for
many years the avoidance behavior of whales around boat traffic emitting
about 120 decibels (dB). She told us the US Navy was about to hit
calving and mating humpback whales off Hawaii intentionally with up to
155 dB to test a device called LFA (low-frequency active) sonar. The
Hawaii test was the third in a series of experiments on whales
specifically designed by the Navy and cooperating scientists to find no
problem with exposing whales to loud noise. Only a few whales were
studied. Only immediate and obvious reactions were noted. No long-term
studies or follow-up analysis was done. None of the other reef life was
studied: not turtles, not fish or their eggs or larvae, and not plankton
or other critical bottom-of-the-food-chain organisms. Any evidence of
disruption or deaths was discounted.
Predictably, the Navy announced afterwards that their experiments
showed that whales are a lot less sensitive to loud noise than formerly
thought. Furthermore they argued that the Navy should be allowed to go
ahead and deploy their LFA device all over the world at a source level
of about 240 dB-some of the loudest noise ever created by human beings.
The Navy has been testing LFA illegally for over a
decade. It is designed to find very quiet enemy submarines by flooding
the oceans with intense sounds and then reading the echo. Its stated
intention is to deploy LFA on four ships over at least eighty percent of
the world's oceans. The Navy has now issued a Final Environmental Impact
Statement for the system, arguing that it can keep a really good
look-out and guarantee that no whale or dolphin gets too close to the
broadcasting ship and receives no more than 180 dB. Sound below 180 dB
is considered benign because it has not been proven to cause physical
injury (even though the safe level for human divers is pegged at 145dB-
5,000 times less intense.) Temporary deafness (called TTS for temporary
threshold shift) is not considered an injury even though it can last for
days and expose the creature to all kinds of threats such as predators
and ship-strikes. All avoidance behavior is ignored.
Since February 1998, AWI has led the direct-action
protests to stop the testing and deployment of LFA sonar, a device we
believe could well be the single greatest threat to ocean life; greater
than whalers’ harpoons, greater than toxic contamination, greater even
than climate changes. In Hawaii, we organized swimmers to swim alongside
the Navy's research vessel Cory Chouest. Its research protocol demanded
LFA be turned off if human swimmers were within five miles. Because of
the swimmers, the Navy was forced to turn off its device about half of
the time.
AWI organized a press conference at the National
Press Club in Washington in April 2000 to present evidence from a mass
stranding of whales and dolphins that had occurred a month earlier in
the Bahamas, just after the passage of a Navy group testing
anti-submarine sonar. The sonar was different from LFA but just as loud.
CT scans on the heads of killed Cuvier's Beaked whales showed brain
hemorrhages linked to ear hemorrhages. The Navy sonar had literally
blown their ears out by resonating the air passages so violently it
ruptured tissue. Of the thirty-five beaked whales photo-identified in
the area before the stranding, none has been seen since. At least seven
other strandings have been linked to the testing of LFA and other active
sonars. This is a deadly technology.
Now, the Navy has applied to the National Marine
Fisheries Service for a "small take authorization" to allow
killing and injuring whales and dolphins all over the world. By the
Navy's own estimation, this could "take" over ten percent of
some species of whales- including Blue Whales. AWI has joined many other
groups and individuals in testifying against this horrible precedent. In
three public hearings held in late April and early May 2001, not one
speaker from the public testified in favor of granting the Navy the
permit to kill.
The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) gives
every indication, however, that it intends to go ahead and do the Navy's
bidding, even though granting the small-take permit would be illegal. In
order to grant the permit, the Service must ascertain that the effect of
the action would be negligible. As pointed out repeatedly by the Marine
Mammal Commission (the group of independent scientists established by
Congress to advise NMFS on how to administer the MMPA), the
"taking" of over five percent of species of marine mammals is
by no stretch of the imagination either "small" or
"negligible."
But in order to grease the skids for the launching
of this device, the NMFS has been actively changing the rules. The
Office of Protected Species has declared that sound in the oceans only
becomes worrisome at over 180 decibels, overturning the long-held
premise that whales, seals and dolphins begin avoiding sound at 120
decibels or less. The decibel scale is logarithmic: 130dB is ten times
more intense a sound than 120dB. 180dB is therefore a million times more
intense than 120dB- a dramatic increase in the level of manmade sound in
the oceans considered by the US government to be acceptable.
The same office, working in concert with the Navy,
has also proposed to change the definition of "level B
harassment" so that only actions that threaten the ability of a
population to recover are considered. This standard is so vague and
unproveable as to be a recipe for disaster. If dead individual whales
are ignored, and avoidance behavior is ignored, a population could
collapse before we would even be able to monitor its decline.
LFA must not be deployed. Testing must stop. New
passive sonars developed by the Navy render this environmentally
disastrous system unnecessary.
In concert with the Green Scissors Coalition, Earth
Island Institute, the Friends of the Earth, Humane Society of the United
States, Taxpayers for Common Sense, and the Natural Resources Defense
Council and others, AWI’s companion organization, the Society for
Animal Protective Legislation is pushing hard for oversight hearings to
be held in Congress to strip away the secrecy surrounding this project.
We want the full cost to taxpayers and to the whales of the world to be
divulged.
Ben White
International Coordinator
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