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White House Approves Sonic Cannons For Atlantic Energy Exploration

Posted by Soulskill on from the still-waiting-on-my-sonic-screwdriver dept.

An anonymous reader writes: The White House on Friday gave final approval to allow the use of sonic cannons in finding energy deposits underneath the ocean floor on the U.S. Atlantic seaboard. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management says that finding energy resources off the Atlantic seaboard "could generate thousands of jobs, but has also acknowledged that the process will harm sea creatures." Sonic cannons "fire sound waves 100 times louder than a jet engine." Mammals such as whales and dolphins that communicate through sound will most likely be affected, but scientists aren't sure to what extent. They also aren't sure how the cannons will affect fish and other sea creatures or how any physiological effects on them may impact the fishing industries of the U.S. and the other countries who rely on seafood that migrate into and out of the Atlantic Ocean.

22 of 272 comments (clear)

  1. Lol by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Fuck the earth, we do what we want!

    1. Re:Lol by davester666 · · Score: 4, Funny

      everything is safe until we absolutely, 100%, know, for sure, with absolutely no dissent from anyone, that it is not safe.

      --
      Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
    2. Re:Lol by davester666 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      in small print "for foreign workers"

      --
      Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
    3. Re: Lol by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Everything is safe always, you mean. In a world with the GOP, the EPA could find that this causes a 10000% increase in sudden infant death syndrome and no ban will pass the House because of "rabble rabble job creators class warfare energy independence"

    4. Re:Lol by dbIII · · Score: 4, Funny

      The last one was good but the Canadians burnt it down.

    5. Re:Lol by Nyder · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Hey man, didn't you read "could generate thousands of jobs?" Let me say that again. COULD. MAKE. THOUSANDS. JOBS.

      End of discussion. We all know the only things worse than aborting potential jobs are terrorism and taxes.

      Ya, but those jobs are going to be cleaning the dead fish & sea mammals off beaches.

      --
      Be seeing you...
  2. Hoping this is not as bad as it sounds by sideslash · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Can they give "warning shots" for some time period ahead of time to clear the area? Can they definitively detect whether any large mammals are in the vicinity before giving the big blasts?

    Actually, even if they can, this sounds really bad, no pun intended. :(

    1. Re:Hoping this is not as bad as it sounds by Antique+Geekmeister · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The _turf_ of bottom dwelling creatures can be quite small, especially of mollusks. Injuring them, or driving away their predators, is likely to have quite large ecological consequences. Even driving away vegetarian creatures from their feeding grounds is likely to interfere with stable ecologies.

    2. Re:Hoping this is not as bad as it sounds by Rei · · Score: 4, Informative

      286 db at source? Air cannons are 250 db at source, so 3 and a half orders of magnitude less powerful. Lightning in the ocean is 260 db at source and your average square kilometer of ocean gets two strikes per year. These ships will be covering tens of millions of square kilometers. With a pulse rate of once every 10 seconds (3.2 million pulses per year per ship, if they run constantly, which they almost certainly won't), you're looking at an order of magnitude less per ship than lightning (and I doubt there will be many ships, and they won't always be in operation). And lightning striking water is an order of magnitude louder. It even causes shock waves in the water by the same mechanism - rapidly creating an air bubble in the water (in lightning's case, by boiling the water) which then oscillates as it implodes and explodes repeatedly.

      Now, one could say that this is different because it's all in one place at a given time, and thus animals would be tempted to flee instead of it being a one-off thing. But then again, lightning strikes aren't spread out evenly over space and time either, they come in thunderstorms which do the exact same thing, repeatedly hitting the same section of sea for hours at a time.

      I'm not saying that I think these ships are harmless - not at all. I just think that I think people are overplaying it when they make these apocalyptic pronouncements on what effect they'll have on sea life. I mean, people have been detonating underwater *atomic bombs* - how do you think that compares to the sound of a pop of air? At 400 feet, a blue whale's own calls (188db @ 1m) are louder than the air gun.

      --
      People said I was dumb, but I proved them.
    3. Re:Hoping this is not as bad as it sounds by JMJimmy · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Speaking strictly in terms of pressure:

        - A 1kt nuclear explosion is 300-310db re 1 Pa at 1m
        - A seismic air cannon is 264-270db re 1 Pa at 1m
        - Whales can go anywhere from 108 to 225b re 1 Pa at 1m

      Looking at that without any context one might think it's no big deal. Except that for every 6db you're doubling the pressure.

      240db re 1 Pa at 1m is 100% lethal to fish and mammals up to 125m, permanent hearing loss on all trauma frequencies to >50% of fish/mammals to a range of 900m and causes some permanent hearing damage up to 1.5km (McAnuff and Booren, 1976; Yelverton and Richmond, 1981; Phillips et al., 1989: Richmond et al., 1989; Myricket ai., 1989)

  3. Other loud noises by ishmaelflood · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I wonder how loud they are compared with underwater explosions, volcanoes and seaquakes?

    1. Re:Other loud noises by Rei · · Score: 3, Informative

      Common screwup. Those are all atmosphere-rated decibel figures. Underwater decibel figures are listed at 61.5 dB louder than their atmospheric equivalents. 250 dB underwater is 188.5 atmospheric.

      Adjusting your above examples to be underwater figures, we get:

      271.5 dB 2.0 earthquake
      296.5 dB 5.0 earthquake
      309.5 dB atom bomb
      371.5 dB loudest volcano

      I'd think it obvious that an air cannon isn't going to produce sound levels equivalent to an atomic bomb. And actually one would expect an underwater atomic bomb to be much louder than a surface one, far more of the energy is going to go into creating a gigantic oscillating bubble. And lastly, your cited atomic bomb figure is only for the 16 and 21 kiloton bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Modern thermonuclear weapons are generally three orders of magnitude higher yield than that. A large thermonuclear weapon in deep water will create a bubble on the order of magnitude of a kilometer in size, which will then oscillate in a series of collapses and reexplosions. The oscillating bubbles created by air cannons are practically microscopic by comparison.

      --
      People said I was dumb, but I proved them.
  4. The White House isn't stupid.. by Rigel47 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    They know that above all the oil must flow. Without the oil that came from the fracking boom oil would probably be at $150/barrel or higher. Without flowing oil the economy suffers (many past recessions were precipitated by high oil prices), the common man starts to get irritated at higher food prices, less disposable income.. for those that had disposable income to start with. The house of cards starts to sway even more.

    Cheap oil is the real bread and circus that keeps the masses subdued. Some dead whales and dolphins isn't even a consideration.

    1. Re:The White House isn't stupid.. by __aanbvm4272 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      So You're saying oil is cheap now??? You are blind to investor trading. Who is buying oil at $120 a barrel? We don't know because it's a 'privacy thing'. Or trade secret they say How convenient.... So what if BIG oil is buying their own commodity to keep the #s up. Saudi Arabia said they would be happy with $50 to 60 a barrel and yet it is double where it realistically should be, according to commodity analysts. I have studied it. So saying it would be $150 is a lie and scare tactic. Because THAt is exactly what caused the BIG recession. $147.00 price. Remember the saying "what can we do about it???" Or weren't you alive back when we got robbed of our hi-way freedom. We are paying TWICE as much as we should be for gasoline to line some traders pocket. PERIOD. wake up. The war in Iraq was supposedly going to free up oil and we have never paid more ever since.

    2. Re:The White House isn't stupid.. by saleenS281 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Or, if they went back to banning speculation on commodities, oil would be $25/barrel. But not allowing wall street to fuck us would be anti-American and borderline COMMUNIST!

  5. Even regular sonar wreaks havoc on marine life by jenningsthecat · · Score: 4, Informative

    When sonar is used, it can create sound pressure levels of 140dB 300 miles from the source . The sound is so excruciating that whales will surface too fast and get the bends, and/or beach themselves, just to escape the sound.

    Yup, let's rape our irreplaceable planet some more while torturing innocent, intelligent creatures. After all, they aren't human, and our comfort, convenience, and entertainment are so much more important than their lives.

    --
    'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
    1. Re:Even regular sonar wreaks havoc on marine life by LynnwoodRooster · · Score: 4, Informative

      Decibels used in SONAR are referenced to 1 microPascal; deciBels used in audio are referenced to 20 microPascals. Thus there is a 26 dB difference in level. A level of 140 dB underwater is the same as 114 dB SPL (in air). About a mid-level peak at an EDM club. Source: designing SONAR systems for scientific and fisheries research for the better part of a decade...

      --
      Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
  6. Some of the jobs this would create by marciot · · Score: 5, Funny

    1) Fish Deafness Specialist
    2) Hearing Aid Designer for Dolphins
    3) Bass Boosting Headphone Maker for Bass
    4) ASL Teachers for Octopi
    5) Jellyfish Mending Seamstress
    6) Aquatic PTSD Therapist
    7) Exploding Whale Cleanup Crew

  7. Re:BAD,Bad, Bad! by jbolden · · Score: 4, Insightful

    You are the reason environmentalism gets discredited. Of course our needs are a consideration. The oceans must exist for future generations to do what for them? Fulfill their needs. The first imperative of every species is survival, that is nature. We can talk about balance or relative cost, but there is no way that humans are going to agree to extinct themselves.

  8. Bullshit by l0ungeb0y · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Just because they don't have exact figures, doesn't mean they don't know the outcome. They've already seen the effects our underwater noise making with naval craft and underwater military technology has had. But hey, as long as they can say "we don't know exactly100% for sure" it's A-OK, because the US needs jobs. And so the self-proclaimed "most transparent", "pro middle-class", "pro environment", "anti-lobbyist" President in History® gives BP, Shell and Exxon the OK to drive aquatic mammals into killing themselves and to suffer social separation because that's EXACTLY what they already know happens when we bombard the ocean with sonic disturbances. They just don' t know HOW MUCH WORSE it will be. just that it will be worse.

  9. Why should people change their energy use... by thetoadwarrior · · Score: 4, Insightful

    When you can kill off the coasts to get a few more scraps to move everyone along until the US finds more oil owning brown people it can 'liberate'.

  10. THOUSANDS of Job Opportunities! by blackbeak · · Score: 3, Funny

    Wanted: Marine Life Impersonators. Must have own costume and be able to thrive in salt water conditions. Overtime available.

    --
    Everything and its opposite is true. Get used to it.