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Oceans Are Getting Louder, Posing Potential Threats To Marine Life (nytimes.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Slow-moving, hulking ships crisscross miles of ocean in a lawn mower pattern, wielding an array of 12 to 48 air guns blasting pressurized air repeatedly into the depths of the ocean. The sound waves hit the sea floor, penetrating miles into it, and bounce back to the surface, where they are picked up by hydrophones. The acoustic patterns form a three-dimensional map of where oil and gas most likely lie. The seismic air guns probably produce the loudest noise that humans use regularly underwater, and it is about to become far louder in the Atlantic. As part of the Trump administration's plans to allow offshore drilling for gas and oil exploration, five companies have been given permits to carry out seismic mapping with the air guns all along the Eastern Seaboard, from Central Florida to the Northeast, for the first time in three decades. The surveys haven't started yet in the Atlantic, but now that the ban on offshore drilling has been lifted, companies can be granted access to explore regions along the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific. And air guns are now the most common method companies use to map the ocean floor.
Some scientists say the noises from air guns, ship sonar and general tanker traffic can cause the gradual or even outright death of sea creatures, from the giants to the tiniest — whales, dolphins, fish, squid, octopuses and even plankton. Other effects include impairing animals' hearing, brain hemorrhaging and the drowning out of communication sounds important for survival, experts say. So great is the growing din in the world's oceans that experts fear it is fundamentally disrupting the marine ecosystem, diminishing populations of some species as the noise levels disturb feeding, reproduction and social behavior. A 2017 study, for example, found that a loud blast, softer than the sound of a seismic air gun, killed nearly two-thirds of the zooplankton in three-quarters of a mile on either side. Tiny organisms at the bottom of the food chain, zooplankton provide a food source for everything from great whales to shrimp. Krill, a tiny crustacean vital to whales and other animals, were especially hard hit, according to one study.
Some scientists say the noises from air guns, ship sonar and general tanker traffic can cause the gradual or even outright death of sea creatures, from the giants to the tiniest — whales, dolphins, fish, squid, octopuses and even plankton. Other effects include impairing animals' hearing, brain hemorrhaging and the drowning out of communication sounds important for survival, experts say. So great is the growing din in the world's oceans that experts fear it is fundamentally disrupting the marine ecosystem, diminishing populations of some species as the noise levels disturb feeding, reproduction and social behavior. A 2017 study, for example, found that a loud blast, softer than the sound of a seismic air gun, killed nearly two-thirds of the zooplankton in three-quarters of a mile on either side. Tiny organisms at the bottom of the food chain, zooplankton provide a food source for everything from great whales to shrimp. Krill, a tiny crustacean vital to whales and other animals, were especially hard hit, according to one study.
Both of you need to get a room.
Of course what is really going on is a mad rush to find and develop fields, do enough to package them as an investment, sell them to pension funds and then bet against them going belly up, crushed by nuclear and renewable, same insanely greedy rush to develop underwater property, to sell it to mug punters, prior to them going literally underwater, well, at least the bits attached to the ground.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
You really think they're two different people?
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
, Georgians always complain it's too humid, if they start bitching about the noise, just tell them it's a rave.
go up to eleven.
... as well as for hunting/fishing, fur trappers and so on should be sunk.
I shouldn't even have to explain why. It should be obvious why.
I suggest we put you in scuba gear and drag you under the ships in question for a month month and then maybe we can find out.
Someone is going to explore.
No. Some people including whole nations act responsibly.
are destroying the planet with both hands. Prepare to evacuate planet!
Let them cover their ears until the noise goes away. Simple, effective.
...omphaloskepsis often...
Whilst science-bashing is depressingly popular on slashdot (news for nerds who think science is a vast left wing conspiracy). At least go to the effort of engaging with the story? Theres literally a link to the primary study ( https://www.nature.com/article... , plug it into sci-hub if you don't have academic or institutional access ) in the article, which is pretty much on point for the story. The NYTimes story itself actually answers who "Some scientists" and "experts" are.
So heres the thing. Either you didn't actually read the article, or you did and aren't quite bright enough to parse it.
Or your a boring alt-right virtue signaller who wants to be the first to post "REEEEEE" into a comment, because clearly posting the same joke over and over and over again is the height of wit.
Embarassing!
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
Nuclear power got its fate sealed in 1986. It *has* all to do with NIMBY'ism, you can try to repeat the opposite it won't change the fact that people don't understand the basic physics behind nuclear and will always fear it, and Germany is paying the high price of higher emission because of this, ie. deploying unreliable renewable and requiring gas burning plants and imports to deal with load demand.
So the energy brands from the UK, Italy, France, and the gov of China should be "free" to explore around the USA?
How on earth did you get this from what the parent said? How are you connecting those things? Your comment just doesn't make sense, you're ranting.
... Other effects include impairing animals' hearing, brain hemorrhaging and the drowning out of communication sounds important for survival ...
Sounds like what happens to an elected "representative" after a year or two walking the halls of power.
Or am I being too generous?
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
Won't someone PLEASE think of the zooplankton?!
I'm wondering if the next President will reverse course and ban offshore drilling again. Could that happen before they get their oil rigs set up? With the incoming flood of electric cars, changes in vehicle ownership due to self-driving tech, and the current low price of oil due to fracking, I'm skeptical that we really need off-shore drilling. If there's another world war and Canada and Mexico embargo us, then sure, otherwise we should be fine. (Hint: we'd be the Axis.)
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
It's just that Howlin' Mad Murphy's pirate radio station is back on the air thanks to the FCC's Search and Destroy team being out of action, thanks to the government shutdown.
#DeleteChrome
I am all for protecting nature and against killing zooplankton and whales, but what is the scale of this? I tend to think that one ship is a literal "drop in the ocean". Does anyone have data not on the effect of these blasts on fish next to it, but rather on fish populations? Also, it sounds like it would be a waste of time and money to blast too loudly where a softer blast would suffice, and therefore my guess is that the power of the blast should be quite small by the time it reaches ocean floor...? I will be happy to be proven wrong but could this be a similar case to the "kids killing themselves with the parents' gun" versus "kids drowned in a swimming pool"?
In the past the whales had been able to sing to each other across whole oceans, even from one ocean to another because sound travels such huge distances underwater. But now, again because of the way in which sound travels, there is no part of the ocean that is not constantly jangling with the hubbub of ships’ motors, through which it is now virtually impossible for the whales to hear each other’s songs or messages.
So fucking what, is pretty much the way that people tend to view this problem, and understandably so, thought Dirk. After all, who wants to hear a bunch of fat fish, oh all right, mammals, burping at each other?
But for a moment Dirk had a sense of infinite loss and sadness that somewhere amongst the frenzy of information noise that daily rattled the lives of men he thought he might have heard a few notes that denoted the movements of gods.
- Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
You can never know everything, and part of what you do know will always be wrong. Perhaps even the most important part.
Honestly, scuba diving even a good few miles away from a cruise ship leaving port leaves you feeling the horrible rumbling and hearing the dull droning sound. It's pretty obvious that even floating tenements that allow poor people to pretend they're on a luxury holiday because they get to experience the odd day here and there in paradise whilst spending the rest of the time on a giant council estate with more pollution than Delhi (as opposed to actually going on holiday in paradise) clearly have an effect on the oceans around them for a good few miles, it seems likely that any area seeing that day in day out multiple times a day is going to clearly have some kind of impact in an environment not previously accustomed to that noise or rumbling effect and that's a fraction of the sound being talked about in TFA from Sonar and air guns.
I've never experienced it myself but there are plenty of reports of divers having been in the water during sonar pings significant distances away and feeling fairly severe pain as a result of it.
Contrary to popular belief, even without boat traffic reefs are noisy places, the sound of a thousand parrot fish covering a few square miles can be heard as a constant crackling biting bits of reef when diving, and that's a relatively small sound. It should be obvious how big a problem this is with much louder noises.
Remember sound travels further and faster in water, so any sound being generated has the potential to culminate to much higher levels than we're used to on land because sound sources from vast distances away can combine much more easily underwater for this reason. Depending on th sounds generated for example you might not hear two sound sources miles apart on land if you're between them, but placed in the same positions in water, you could well hear not one, but both at once in contrast, so yes, sound underwater can be a much bigger problem.
don't worry, the fish can just buy ear-muffs.
I'm not a greenie, but afaik this really is a problem. Hadn't heard about the sound blasts for oil surveys, but just the noise from ships is apparently a serious problems for certain species.
Anyone who has spent time in a swimming pool knows how well sound travels underwater. Noise pollution takes on a completely different dimension.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Some governments try protect their assets through NOAA and the JNCC by requesting soft start procedures. This means slowly ramping up the volume to give a chance for cetaceans to get away.
More or less, the deeper you want to go with your survey then the louder you'll need to be.
I believe there are ways to be more efficient with the energy used but I'm not versed enough to explain the specifics of this.
Most governments don't protect their territorial waters with the soft start requests. They also don't monitor marine mammals with acoustic monitoring. Requesting these procedures pretty much anywhere would be a start to making some progress in this area.
A blog I run for the wealth
NIMBYism makes nuclear more costly. Unnecessary regulations make nuclear more costly.
Construction delays because of constant lawsuits to prevent nuclear plant construction makes nuclear more costly - tying up capital for decades before you start earning any money on it can double the cost of nuclear power.
You cannot divorce the cost of nuclear from the strategies that have been used to delay and stop it. In fact, making nuclear uneconomic is exactly what the anti-nuclear crowd has done successfully - it has been their goal.
Comments like that being modded -1 is due to your utter failure to address the issues raised by sg_oneill. Get over yourself.
I'm concerned about the undersea mining vacuum operations around Africa that rip up the ocean floor looking for diamonds. The oceans are not protected from corporations with no ethics. Japanese whaling is another example of damaging exploitation that has no opposition.
I understand we are still reliant on oil, but for fucks sake, stop killing everything around. Who wants their grandchildren to inherit an Earth with nothing but cockroaches and algae left on it?
Nimbyism, regulations, and lawsuits seem to make most all power generation more expensive or impossible. Pipelines, dams, power lines, wind farms, fracking.
Then there are the costs from lack of regulation. 100's of millions to fix the dam down the road because they didn't bother connecting it to bedrock when built for example. Cleanup costs from companies that shutdown as soon as profits dropped and cleanup was needed is a huge cost in the oil industry.
Unregulated nuclear is scary. Cost cutting, companies that shutdown as soon as problems appear and such, all leaving the tax payers on the hook.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
It would be hard to know whom do what, plus it's a retarded argument anyway because changing how you do things is also an option. Also I've never owned a car.
Nimbyism, regulations, and lawsuits seem to make most all power generation more expensive or impossible. Pipelines, dams, power lines, wind farms, fracking.
But none of them provoke the visceral fear of the unknown that nuclear power does, or evoke visions of mushroom clouds, even though every one of them has killed orders of magnitude more people (except maybe fracking; but I don't think we yet understand the costs of fracking). This means none of them have the depth of organized opposition, or the many options for running up costs.
Unregulated nuclear is scary. Cost cutting, companies that shutdown as soon as problems appear and such, all leaving the tax payers on the hook.
Sure, sensible regulation is sensible. But that's not what we have in the nuclear industry. We have a combination of ridiculous over-regulation that essentially stops all new construction, combined with ridiculously lax extensions on operating permits because without new construction we don't have anything else to take over the baseload when we shut an old plant down. This is the worst of all worlds. We're essentially running headlong toward a significant nuclear accident because of our regulations that are supposed to prevent nuclear accidents.
I have no opposition to sun, wind, etc. I think they're great, and I'm just fine with replacing nuclear power with them. But that's going to take time, and in the meantime we're going to keep burning coal and dumping gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere. At this point it's probably too late to try to ramp up nuclear production. Even if we got instantly rational about it, by the time we could build the nuclear capacity we need, we can probably deploy the same capacity in renewables + utility-scale storage. We screwed ourselves 20-30 years ago when renewables weren't practical, and now we're just going to eat the cost, in the form of a warmer planet than we might have had otherwise.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Isn't there a radar frequency that sea water is invisible to?
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
YEAAAAAH ! ! !
GO DONALD ! ! !
KILL EVERYTHING THAT CAN'T VOTE ! ! !
REALLY Gotta' Love AMERICA - - - where ANYBODY (. . . insert appropriate venomous remark . . .) CAN BE PRESIDENT
So Sorry Everybody, I voted 'DONALD' as an anti-Hillary protest !
redneck geek
Granted - the underwater beasts DON'T listen to modern music . . .
BUT - they DO navigate / communicate / LIVE with the underwater 'noise'
Kinda' SUCKS that your NAVAL PROTECTION is _literally_ destroying / overwhelming the echo-location biological organs that the sea-going mammals require to JUST LET ME LIVE ! ! !
redneck geek