US Supreme Court Allows Sonar Use

gollum123 writes "The US Supreme Court has removed restrictions on the Navy's use of sonar in training exercises near California. The ruling is a defeat for environmental groups who say the sonar can kill whales and other mammals. In its 5-4 ruling, the Supreme Court said the Navy needed to conduct realistic training exercises to respond to potential threats. The court did not deal with the merits of the claims put forward by the environmental groups. In reinstating the use of sonar, the top US court rejected a lower federal judge's injunction that had required the US Navy to take various precautions during submarine-hunting exercises. The Bush administration argued that there is little evidence of harm to marine life in more than 40 years of exercises off the California coast. It said that the judges should have deferred to the judgment of the Navy and Mr Bush. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts said overall public interest was 'strongly in favor of the Navy.' 'The most serious possible injury would be harm to an unknown number of the marine mammals,' Chief Justice Roberts wrote. 'In contrast, forcing the Navy to deploy an inadequately trained anti-submarine force jeopardizes the safety of the fleet.'"

Comments

What?

[CWRUisTakingMyMoney]

They didn't deal with the claims put forth by the environmentalists? Then what the hell DID they consider besides the Navy's side? (No, I didn't RTFO.)

Re:What?

[martinw89]

Environmentalists (as opposed to conservationists) depend on emotional appeal rather than science and rational analysis to further their agenda. Ergo, the court rightly dismissed their claims for the bullshit that it is.

Seriously? And this sentence isn't emotional appeal with a lack of science how?

Jepson et al. reporting in Nature has stated that there is a "generally accepted link between some beaked-whale strandings and sonar use" [1]. More specifically, during a Spanish mid frequency sonar exercise 14 beaked-whales beached themselves. Spanish scientists autopsied 10 of the whales and all had damage similar to decompression sickness [2].

There is some science regarding this issue. To completely throw it out the window without consideration, calling it bullshit, is more emotionally driven than the environmentalists you accuse in your post.

And as a side point, what would emotionally charged environmentalists have to gain by stopping sonar exercises around whales?

Re:What?

[Lost Engineer]

The article failed wrt details. There was no specific law. The environmentalists claimed the Navy failed to "prepare an environmental impact statement," supposedly violating the National Environmental Policy Act. It seems the court was saying you can't apply an law broadly directed at civilian activity to the naval exercises. The current Court prefers to make limited decisions. If there were a law specifically regulating the Navy's use of sonar I think they would uphold it, but, absent any law, this case is similar to arguing that the Army can't practice shooting because the bullets are full of lead.

Re:What?

[Xest]

So many fearmongers seem to forget that Russia has a population of only 170mill and dropping. The only threat from Russia is bullying of smaller nations around them and their nuclear arsenal. It doesn't matter how much the US' credit rating weakens it'll still have it's nuclear arsenal as a deterrent to counter that, the nuclear threat is always present but can always be discounted from these types of scenarios because if it happens we're all fucked, if it doesn't happen we're all carrying on as is.

Russia and China aren't in any way allies, they have common goals in the security council sometimes of keeping the US subdued but they also have their own border disputes with each other and really have little in common enough to be as close allies as Europe is to the US for example.

Russia really isn't the type of threat the US needs to worry about in terms of launching submarine based attacks unless for some reason the US becomes an enemy of the likes of Europe also because Europe combined has a vastly bigger set of armed forces than Russia and has more to fear if it goes against the US and hence the West in general due to it being on their doorstep.

Russia also has a lot of internal strife, whilst South Ossetia and Abkhazia worship the ground Russia walks on due to their incursion into Georgia what a lot of people miss is that North Ossetians and Ingushetia and similar would love nothing more than Russia to be distracted in a real war so that they can lop off a sizeable chunk of Russia's lower borders, there are a few other areas of Russia that would rapidly follow suit.

China is in a similar situation, Japan, India, South Korea all have interests in supporting the US if China went aggressive and you could be sure again that Europe would join in. The other similarity with Russia is that any aggression by China would rapidly push away Taiwan, Tibet and possibly even Hong-Kong from their grasp. Even Pakistan has border disputes with it. At the end of the day, China couldn't launch full scale military action elsewhere because it'd lose it's grip on so many regions and find itself a nation that was suddenly a whole lot smaller and a whole lot weaker.

There's an instant fear that because China is so big it's a threat, but whilst it is bigger than any individual nation it's not bigger, nor would it be bigger even with it's allies than the nations whose interests run counter to it and their allies.

There is really no threat from China and Russia even with a weakened US, the Western view has too much support from too many strong nations and should there be such thing as another world war, even a lot of the border-line nations would easily drop their distaste with the US to support the West in this kind of scenario, whilst Venezuela, Bolivia and so forth may support the Russians/Chinese you can guarantee Argentina, Brazil, Columbia, Mexico would all side with the US. The Middle East would largely be a stalemate with Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, UAE, Israel siding off against Iran, Syria and potentially Lebanon.

The assault by Russia into Georgia was to make a point, the US has established bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, on Russia's Southern borders, in Japan to Russia's East and now in Poland et al. on Europe's Western borders and in Greenland and in cooperation with Canada over the arctic to it's North. Russia knows it's surrounded, it knows it can't break out but with Georgia it also knew it had a sudden chance to make a point and send a message to other smaller nations like Georgia warning them to not allow anymore US influence on it's borders.

China and Russia are simply outmanned and outgunned in conventional warfare by a massive amount regardless of the US's strength in the world. The Western ideal whilst regularly slagged off simply has too much core support at the end of the day because so many nations know that the alternative is simply much worse. It is for these reasons that China and Russia simply are not in the position to attack the US with conventional warfare and almost certainly will not be for many, many decades- long after the current range of submarines, other military hardware and current group of people manning them are retired.

Let the wolves decide whether to eat the sheep

[steelfood]

I don't think the Navy as a government organization or the president have anything relevant to say in the matter. It is what the marine biologists and the science they do says. If their science says that such operations definitely harm marine mammals, then the Navy should be required to take certain precautions before doing their exercises. If there is no conclusive evidence, or if the evidence is circumstantial at best, then there's no reason to stop the Navy from doing their thing until such evidence is found.

Now, if the evidence was indeed that strong, maybe PETA or some other animal rights group can and should bring suit against the Navy for harming the animals. If indeed the evidence is that strong, then this ruling is meaningless (the Supreme court didn't comment on the environmentalist's stance, which leaves the door wide open for more lawsuits). But until that time that the evidence really becomes that strong, I'm not sure national security should be jeopardized for the sake of a hunch or even an educated guess.

Re:Navy's response.

[RobertM1968]

That's irrelevant. There are plenty of other places where testing can be done - place other than those we know that whales are frequently at.

The testing and training isnt at issue - the location was.

Just like the example cited above by the guy you responded to. Jets can fly reaaaally fast - but not at 1000 feet above a house while breaking the sound barrier.

Re:Little evidence my ass

[LynnwoodRooster]

how about test it on underwater divers... they signed up and it's safe for whales. We could try supreme court justices (with out air tanks though that might skew results)

What kind of device potentially damages animals in a 50 mile radius? Really think about that, this would be equivalent to allowing sonic booms at 1000 feet altitude near cities... and to heck with the broken glass and ear drums. The army has nothing that invasive, the air force has nukes or days of carpet bombing and supersonic aircraft, but they pick the same spots to train where there is minimal wildlife to harm and reuse it over and over.

I'm sure this is just a case of "boys with toys" making things bigger and louder because they can and pulling rank when asked to tone it down.

Well, there IS no device - short of a nuclear bomb - that would create the 50 mile radius damage you quote. Directed sound in water falls off at a rate of 20logR, meaning that at a distance of 10 meters you are down 20 dB; at 100 meters you are down 40 dB. At a distance of 10,000 meters - about 6 miles - you are down 80 dB.

An EXTREMELY powerful SONAR system might be capable of 250 dB ref 1 uPa within its beam angle. Meaning that at 10,000 meters and within the beam angle you would have a level of 170 dB. At that 50 mile radius? You would have 150 dB.

How much pressure is that? Considering that 10m of water is approximately 1 atmosphere (~193 dB SPL, or ~219 dB ref 1 uPa), that would be equivalent to having a ~15cm wave go over you.

Even closer, we see that at a range of 100 meters the level is down to 210 dB, meaning about the same as a 3m wave passing over your position underwater. How that damages an animal living IN the water in the open ocean I can't fathom.

I submit it is NOT the pressure at all; in fact, the pressure generated from the fluke of baleen whale is near 230 dB (and the pressure at 10m from an ocean freighter's prop is about 230 dB as well). If there IS an impact on marine mammals it is probably from the frequency and the sudden "appearance" of an audible frequency. In other words, like walking up behind someone and going "boo".

There is a tremendous amount of precedence for this hypothesis too; for example, blueback herring are highly sensitive to ~105 kHz signals and will scatter at the slightest noise in that range (which happens to be the third harmonic of the primary click range of bottlenose dolphins). You can blast those herring all day long with 230+ dB SPL at 200 kHz, or at 70 kHz without a problem, and get accurate biomass estimates; go near them with an ultra-low power (140 dB SPL) 105 kHz carrier and they scatter like leaves on the wind.

And yes, I was (for nearly 7 years) a real live SONAR engineer working in the marine and fisheries research SONAR world, and am still a practicing acoustician (20 years experience).