Jumping for joy? A humpback whale breaches. | Photo: Gregory Smith, some rights reserved
The U.S. Navy and a federal agency charged with protecting ocean life havent done enough to make sure tests of experimental sonar wont hurt marine mammals, a federal appeals court ruled late last week. The ruling is a bit of a reprieve for marine mammals, which stand to suffer significant potential harm from this obscure aspect of American foreign policy.
The Navy intends to tow 18 underwater loudspeakers 100 meters below the surface of the ocean in the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans, along with the Mediterranean Sea, to test new ways of detecting increasingly quiet submarines operated by potentially unfriendly nations. The tests, which would take place over a five-year period, are part of the Navy's so-called surveillance towed array sensor system low-frequency active sonar program, an imposing name with the equally imposing acronym SURTASS LFA.
Those loudspeakers would emit very loud pings - around 230 decibels - that will bounce off of solid underwater objects. The echoes will be picked up by SURTASS LFA's microphones, and computers will analyze the echoes to determine whether any of those echoing underwater objects are enemy submarines. The eventual goal, according to the Navy, is a global submarine detection network with which the United States can track submarines and other ships in all the world's oceans. The testing would expose almost three-quarters of Earth's oceans to those loud pings.
Critics charge that those pings could wreak havoc on the worlds beleaguered marine mammals, and possibly other sea life as well. The projects most vocal opponents are breathing a collective sigh of relief at a Friday ruling by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that the federal government violated the Marine Mammal Protection Act in approving the tests.
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At issue, claims the Navy, is the United States' ability to detect relatively quiet diesel-electric submarines in an increasingly loud ocean. The Navy has long relied on so-called passive sonar - a.k.a. listening - using a network of seabed microphones. Computers sort out the enemy sub noise from random ship traffic and other confounding sounds. As the oceans get noisier, claims the Navy, it's harder and harder to sort out the subs from the container ships and oil tankers.
That justification for the project has remained unchanged since the 1990s, though the Navy has access to computer processing power orders of magnitude more powerful than it did during the Clinton administration. Critics have pointed out that passive sonar works as well as it ever has in the open ocean: it's along coastlines, where underwater sound echoes off the complex shallow seabed and rocky shore, that passive sonar can falter. And since the U.S. Navy could thus track any attacking diesel-electric submarines long before they reach the U.S. coast, as their silent electric mode can only be used for relatively short distances, some analysts have suggested that active sonar such as SURTASS LFA is primarily useful along the coasts of hostile countries the United States is attempting to invade, where those diesel electric subs might be lurking close to home, in defense mode.
And indeed, thats how SURTASS LFA was described in defense trade journals throughout the 1990s; as a tool for use in naval campaigns during U.S. interventions overseas.
The South African Navys diesel-electric submarine SAS Charlotte Maxeke with the frigate HMS Portland during an exercise | Photo: Defence Images, some rights reserved
How do whales figure into this geopolitical weapons technology issue? Noises as loud as those used by the SURTASS LFA program have been shown to cause potentially fatal injury to marine mammals at short range. The pings' effects on more distant wildlife is not yet settled, though marine mammal advocates point out that seriously injured marine mammals have stranded themselves after regional sonar tests in a number of places over the last couple of decades.
That brought the U.S. Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA) into play. In order to conduct its tests legally, the Navy needed clearance from the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), the agency charged with enforcement of the MMPA and other marine wildlife law. If NMFS found that the Navy's plan posed an unacceptable risk to protected marine mammals, the Navy would have had to head back to the drawing board. But in 2012 NMFS signed off on the Navy's test plan, saying that the Navy had agreed to measures that would protect wildlife from harm caused by the project. Among those measures were agreements to stay more than 12 miles from coastlines, and to avoid offshore biologically important areas identified by NMFS.
Those measures didn't reassure environmental and wildlife protection groups, a number of which sued NMFS in an attempt to force the agency to reconsider. The Natural Resources Defense Council and its co-plaintiffs charged that NMFS hadn't lived up to its responsibility to protect marine mammal habitat from SURTASS LFA in the vast majority of the ocean habitats that would be subjected to loud noise during the tests. NMFS designated just 73 of those offshore biologically important areas in its review of the SURTASS LFA project, saying that there wasn't enough known about marine mammal presence in other parts of the oceans to justify protecting their habitat. NRDC and its co-plaintiffs argued that absence of data for unprotected parts of the ocean didn't mean absence of marine mammals - a position that some NMFS scientists had also argued before their agency's decision.
The green groups and the Navy each have scientists that support their cases. But it makes sense that very loud noise in the ocean would pose a serious risk to animals that p
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Jumping for joy? A humpback whale breaches. | Photo: Gregory Smith, some rights reserved 
