Oceans Are Getting Louder, Posing Potential Threats To Marine Life (nytimes.com) 127
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.
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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.
Re:Conjecture much... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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.
Re:Conjecture much... (Score:5, Insightful)
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... [nature.com] , 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!
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The Scam (Score:3)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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
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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 t
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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 ov
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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.
A power generation techology with a proven track record of catastrophic failures and irradiating huge areas of the plantet's surface has NIMBYism problems ... I wonder why? Could it be that nobody wants the things in their back yard for a reason and that the anti-nuke crowd has a pint? Just a thought ... Now start telling us about 'breeder reactors', I have some choice comments from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and the US Navy on those things.
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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 fai
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Breeder reactors are not more uneconomical than LWRs unless you treat the cost of safely storing the spent fuel for thousands of years as an externality. And unfortunately, it was necessary to externalize that risk that in the short term to make it economical enough to jump-start the nascent industry. The need to treat some unavoidable costs as an externality exist for almost every industry that is just getting started. Unfortunately, thanks to reduced R&D spending resulting from only minimal nuclea
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How do you explain France then? They used to love nuclear, built loads of it, have new sites already approved.
Or what about the UK? Sites already approved, ready for someone to start building a reactor. The government even guaranteed well above market rate for the energy produced, plus all the usual subsidies.
Yet companies are pulling out and taxpayers are fed up with the massive bills. The cost clearly isn't related to NIMBYs, that's already been taken care of.
Atlanta, Atlantis (Score:2)
, Georgians always complain it's too humid, if they start bitching about the noise, just tell them it's a rave.
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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.
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Nuclear and renewables are used to generate electricity. Petroleum is used for transportation.
A quarter of all petroleum is used in manufacturing of physical goods. It's doubtful that even this will continue much into the foreseeable future given recent advances in cellulose processing.
The days of petroleum use in transportation are literally numbered.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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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 marke
Jobs or (Score:1)
Someone is going to explore.
Lets make sure its the USA so the science and resulting work stays in the USA.
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Someone is going to explore.
No. Some people including whole nations act responsibly.
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But not the USA is not free to export the world????
Make the 3D maps and get the US brands in first. Export that new energy to the world.
Use the science of the loud strong sound waves to fully secure generations of wealth for US investors.
Its rig job time and the USA is hiring locally again.
Jobs, energy security, return for investors.
Win, win, win.
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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.
These oceans (Score:3)
go up to eleven.
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It's like a Shark Sandwich.
The ships used for this (Score:1)
... 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.
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Well, you're using modern electronics, a modern computer network, numerous servers and your own computing device to post that message so clearly you support the modern use of the world's resources for communication purposes.
Given that I'm not finding your reason for wanting to sink the ships that assure continued provision of such resources obvious at all. Perhaps you could educate me, ideally in a way that doesn't prove you're a virtue signally hypocrite.
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We don't need the oil for energy, possibly not for anything but I assume the other use cases are very limited in volume relative the energy part, and it's ass-hole behavior far beyond acceptable and are still being done because it's less noticeable since we don't live there.
Reasoning like if you ever go for a walk and end up killing an ant you may just as well kill everything you see or else you're a hypocrite.
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Doesn't have to blast the oceans for that.
We don't need to find any more oil.
We totally don't need them so it's just fine to ban it outright and to destroy anyone doing so anyway.
Humans (Score:2)
are destroying the planet with both hands. Prepare to evacuate planet!
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are destroying the planet with both hands. Prepare to evacuate planet!
The Dolphins wanted me to relay this message... Goodbye and thanks for all the fish!
... but we don't like the plastic aftertaste and the noise levels around here are getting way out of bounds so we are bugging out ahead of schedule.
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Yup. Mankind bad, mmmkay?
Apparently we just don't get anything right; but there is no way 7 billion of us, with needs of energy, transportation, communication, and commodities, are not going to take a substantial toll on the planet's resources and ecosystems.
May as well have all humans drink the Jim Jones Koolaid and off ourselves from the face of the planet so nature can return to her natural state of bliss; then and only then can the unicorns return and rainbows will be permanent.
Either this, or we sho
noise is no problem (Score:2)
Let them cover their ears until the noise goes away. Simple, effective.
This is sounding familiar.... (Score:2)
... 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?
Plankton Eardrums Bursting (Score:2)
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
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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.)
It could very well be that a great many investors, having to choose between investing in offshore drilling and renewables, simply choose not to fall into the 'buggy whip trap' and invest in the choice that has a future. Also, careful investors will want to wait and see what happens in 2020, for the exact reason you mentioned, president man-baby could be voted out and offshore drilling could be banned again (and I hope it will be). Extraction costs for offshore oil will only increase as they move into pickin
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Extraction costs for offshore oil will only increase as they move into picking higher and higher hanging fruit.
When you talk about "offshore oil", you do realize that being underwater means the "higher hanging fruit" would actually be easier to get to because it isn't as deep, right?
The extraction costs of wind and solar are basically zero.
"Basically zero" means "isn't zero but I don't want to say that."
The ocean's not getting louder per se (Score:2)
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.
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Shut up, mailbox head. ;)
What is the scale of this? (Score:2)
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Given the likely costs and possible profits, I'd be surprised if they weren't making the loudest sounds money could buy.
Why skimp when going a little softer means you would either a) risk failing to detect oil, b) risk having to redo your survey later, or c) lose the oil-field to a competitor?
Re:What is the scale of this? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Get an old Casio watch with the "beep" alarm.
See how far you can hear it from in the air (10-15 feet in silence, maybe a bit farther with good ears), and how loud it is.
Then jump into a pool and try the same. It's basically at full volume from 100 feet (with a couple of dozen kids playing between the watch and the listener, clear as day).
We had a lot of fun with our watches in the pool as children, we could signal each other from anywhere in the water. We frequented a large bent rectangular pool with the
Douglas Adams already covered this (Score:3)
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
the free market will solve this (Score:2)
don't worry, the fish can just buy ear-muffs.
Not a greenie, but... (Score:2)
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.
'Soft start' procedures and monitoring (Score:2)
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 monit
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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 ! ! !
Diamond Mining Also Destroying the Oceans (Score:2)
Can we stop killing every fucking thing? (Score:2)
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?
There must be a better way to do that (Score:1)
Isn't there a radar frequency that sea water is invisible to?
Oceans Are Getting Louder, Posing Potential Threat (Score:2)
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 !
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Both of you need to get a room.
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You really think they're two different people?