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.

Comments

Re: Oh well, nobody cares...

[Narcocide]

Both of you need to get a room.

The Scam

[rtb61]

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.

Re:The Scam

[Anonymous Coward]

crushed by nuclear and renewable

Nuclear and renewables are used to generate electricity. Petroleum is used for transportation. They are two different markets.

The petroleum market may be crushed by better/cheaper batteries, but not by more efficient electricity generation. Electricity is already way cheaper than gasoline. The problem is how to take it with you on the road.

Bill sometimes you are just so full of shit that it is almost funny. Number one dollar driven use for oil and gas is for petrochemicals and the plastic industries not energy. Low sulfur oil is only at a premium because it can be sold to the petrochemical industry at higher rates, so that is what they are looking for off the east coast of North America. Right now the largest supplier of cheap oil to the US just happens to be Canada which is getting screwed up the ass and paid way down at only 25-30% of market price because we are having a hard time building pipe lines fast enough to dump our glut of crude and natural gas.

The petrochemical industry is pressuring Canada to put two pipes out to the Pacific and bypass the American industry all together and dump our oil and gas into the Asian market where most of the plastic and petrochemical industries do not suffer from tree huggers and environuts bitching about pipe lines and pollution. Contrary to popular belief the US market is shrinking in a big way because labour is not cheap enough and it is almost impossible to build new pipe lines and refining infrastructure in the US. Whereas China does not give a shit whether or not it pollutes the hell out of the atmosphere as long as a few of the oligarchy there remain in power and continue to get rich on the cheap labour that China provides.

Here in Canada we gladly offshore our petrochemical refining and secondary industries, we take it up the ass economically just as much as the idiots who elected Trump do. NO problem offshoring our pollution, who gives a shit as long as we have access to cheap plastic products and some economy based upon the sale of raw materials. We are living on an economy of borrowed time no doubt and will pay heavily for it very soon. The price of food is going up rapidly and when the rich can no longer supply enough bread and circuses for the plebs all hell will break loose the same way it has when ever a society becomes economically stagnant and stratified the way we are currently headed. As we lose the protein sources from the oceans because of our ecological greed and stupidity the price will be social collapse and starvation on a scale that has never been seen before in the history of the human race. We have caused these problems before but never on the scale we are doing it this time around.

Re:The Scam

[dgatwood]

Nuclear power is only dead because of NIMYism. The moment the anti-nuke crowd's ideas started to gain traction, it was all over. We stopped building reactors, which meant R&D slowed to a crawl because there was no reason to design something that would never get built. Thus, improvements that would otherwise have driven down the cost of nuclear power, improved the safety, improved the efficiency, and reduced the size never happened.

And so we're stuck with technology from the dark ages and forty-year-old reactors that keep getting permission to keep running for decades past their design lifetime. And over time, these are going to get less and less safe, again because of NIMYism. Eventually, they will all be discontinued, and everyone will conclude that nuclear power just isn't feasible, when in reality, we just never really tried.

Re:The Scam

[drinkypoo]

Nuclear power is dead because it is built on lies, and there's no reason to believe that will change any time in the future. It was supposed to be clean and cheap. It is neither. Pointing out that it is cleaner than coal is like saying a serial killer has a lower body count than a war - if you get near a point, make it. The decommissioning costs of nuclear are always much higher than claimed, the fuel is never really managed, and breeder reactors are even more uneconomical than nuclear.

Nuclear power has failed on literally all levels, and it's time to admit your mistake and focus on realistic solutions.

These oceans

[Kohath]

go up to eleven.

Re:Conjecture much...

[sg_oneill]

Let's see what is in this fact based plea from an anonymous coward: probably produce, Some scientists say, can cause, experts fear, according to one study.
The science is strong with this REEEEEE for help...

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!

Re:Stop blathering nonsense, you're smarter than t

[x0ra]

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.

Douglas Adams already covered this

[niftydude]

I'm disappointed /. All this noise, and no one has provided the obligatory Doug Adams quote.

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

Re:Conjecture much...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:What is the scale of this?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the biggest problem is that sound travels something like 5 times faster in water, such that one ship could be equivalent to 5 land vehicles emitting the same noise. Depending on temperature and pressure, sound can travel significantly further too, there is a body evidence that suggests that whales can communicate over literally thousands of miles because of this.

This coupled with the fact that things like Sonar are sufficiently loud (200db+) as to be able to rupture the tissues in your brain or rupture you lungs, thus killing you close up, hopefully demonstrates the issue here.

Effectively, imagine something that loud on land, then imagine it travelling 5 times as fast and much much further. It's easy to think the ocean is big, so something like that is a drop in the ocean, but then when something is travelling at 1500m/s it stops being quite so big.

Regarding effects on whales, it's been found that whales can get the bends just like humans can if they ascend too quickly. There has been evidence of whales surfacing too quickly and getting the bends, and descending too quickly and injuring themselves to try and escape from Sonar because the Sonar is even more painful for them. Whether you believe in conservation or not, I think it's hard to not at least have some sympathy, facing a noise so loud and painful it pushes you to be willing to rupture your blood vessels, or surface so fast you burst your lungs or allow an air bubble to expand so quickly it severs the bones in your spine or other bones to escape it is a pretty fucking horrible thing for any living thing to have to suffer.

Even the hunting lobby who typically don't care about conservation at least mostly respect the importance of a quick clean kill, so it's pretty barbaric suffering that these sounds can cause. How widespread it is, I don't know however.

'Soft start' procedures and monitoring

[jago25_98]

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.