NOAA Announces Plan To Silence US Oil Rigs, Dredges and Ships
July 30, 2016 by Reuters
THE SILENCE OF THE HUMANS IS MUSIC TO THE EARS OF THE OCEAN CREATURES
In California, ship strikes of gray whales are the most commonly reported followed by fin, blue, humpback, and sperm whales. Credit: John Calambokidis/Cascadia Reseach Via NOAA
(Reuters) The ocean has gotten noisier for decades, with man-made racket from oil drilling, shipping and construction linked to signs of stress in marine life that include beached whales and baby crabs with scrambled navigational signals.
The United States aims to change that as a federal agency prepares a plan that could force reductions in noise-making activities, including oil exploration, dredging and shipping off the nation’s coast.
“We’ve been worried about ocean noise for decades, since the 1970s,” said Richard Merrick, chief science adviser to the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) fisheries agency and a key author of the agency’s more detailed 10-year plan to be released publicly later this year. “The question is, what should we do now?”
The draft plan calls for developing noise limits and setting up a standardized listening system. It would also call for the creation of an online archive of noise data that could hold thousands of hours of recordings, which scientists could then cross-reference against data on where marine life congregates.
The plan urges more research on the effects of noise on sea creatures and more coordination with environmental and industry groups, the military and government.
Some data is in short supply, since NOAA has assessed the abundance of only 17 percent of the marine mammal species that it is mandated to monitor. Noise also takes on greater urgency with Arctic seas increasingly open to shipping and development with the melting of ice from global warming.
DEAFENING NEMO
The scientists behind the project admit the ocean was never quiet. For millions of years it was filled with sounds ranging from the thunder of storms to the songs of whales. But fish and marine mammals evolved to coexist with those sounds, scientists note.
“A hundred years ago the ocean wasn’t quiet, it was a dynamic acoustic place. But now there is a lot more human noise out there,” said Jason Gedamke, head of the NOAA’s ocean acoustics program.
Man-made noise from such work as pile driving, dredging, seismic air guns used in the search for oil, sonar, power-producing windmills and ice-breaking has raised the sound level dramatically.
Researchers have shown that off the coast of California, for example, underwater noise has risen several-fold in a few decades, in part from an increase in shipping.
The increased noise interferes with the sounds that marine animals use to communicate, hunt and navigate. For instance, blue whales twice the size of school buses and sleek fin whales, known as the “greyhounds of the sea” for their speed, use songs to find food and mates.
Bottlenose dolphins – the kind made popular through the 1960s TV series “Flipper” – locate objects by bouncing sound waves off them.
Fish and crab larvae use reef sounds for directions. Snapping shrimp produce collapsing bubbles whose sound waves stun prey and ward off predators.
NOAA has long required noise permits for one-off events, like drilling. The draft plan would be the first to broadly set long-term rules around noise levels.
Many oil companies already invest in quieter technology, and the European Union is also developing targets for ocean noise. The United Nations’ International Maritime Organization in 2014 adopted voluntary guidelines to reduce underwater noise from ships.
The NOAA proposal has critics on the left and right.
Michael Jasny, a marine noise expert at the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council, said NOAA’s effort was a step forward from its current tactic of muffling noisy machinery.
“Current efforts are like trying to control air pollution by putting a fence around a smokestack,” he said.
The draft strategy has raised concern in the oil industry.
Andy Radford, a senior policy adviser for the American Petroleum Institute, said there was no science to support the idea of harm from the cumulative effects of underwater noise.
“We think it (is) unrealistic to try to return the seas to their prehuman condition,” he said.
(Reporting by Ian Simpson; Editing by Scott Malone and Dan Grebler)
© 2016 Thomson Reuters. All rights reserved.
================
Seven miles deep, the ocean is still a noisy place
NOAA and partners bring back first recordings from deepest part of the world’s ocean
March 2, 2016 For what may be the first time, NOAA and partner scientists eavesdropped on the deepest part of the world’s ocean and instead of finding a sea of silence, discovered a cacophony of sounds both natural and caused by humans.
For three weeks, a titanium-encased hydrophone recorded ambient noise from the ocean floor at a depth of more than 36,000 feet, or 7 miles, in the Challenger Deep trough in the Mariana Trench near Micronesia. Researchers from NOAA, Oregon State University, and the U.S. Coast Guard were surprised by how much they heard.
Hydrophone being lowered into the Challenger Deep trough in the Mariana Trench in 2015. (NOAA)
“You would think that the deepest part of the ocean would be one of the quietest places on Earth,” said Robert Dziak, a NOAA research oceanographer and chief project scientist. “Yet there is almost constant noise. The ambient sound field is dominated by the sound of earthquakes, both near and far, as well as distinct moans of baleen whales, and the clamor of a category 4 typhoon that just happened to pass overhead.”
The hydrophone also picked up sound from ship propellers. Challenger Deep is close to Guam, a regional hub for container shipping with China and the Philippines.
The project, which was funded by the NOAA’s Office of Ocean Exploration and Research, was designed to establish a baseline for ambient noise in the deepest part of the Pacific Ocean. Human-created noise has increased steadily in recent decades and getting these first recordings allows scientists in the future to determine if the noise levels are growing and how this might affect marine animals that use sound to communicate, navigate and feed, such as whales, dolphins and fish.
Getting these first recordings wasn’t easy in an underwater trough deep enough to hold Mount Everest.
“The pressure at that depth is incredible,” said Haru Matsumoto, an Oregon State ocean engineer who worked with NOAA engineer Chris Meinig to adapt the hydrophone. “We had to drop the hydrophone mooring down through the water column at no more than five meters per second to be sure the hydrophone, which is made of ceramic, would survive the rapid pressure change.”
Hauling up hydrophone during the Challenger Deep mission in 2015. (NOAA)
Download Image
While atmospheric pressure in the average home or office is 14.7 pounds per square inch (PSI), it is more than 16,000 PSI at the bottom of the Mariana Trench.
Researchers deployed the hydrophone from the Guam-based U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Sequoia in July 2015. The device recorded sound continuously over 23 days, completely filling the flash drive. However, scientists had to wait until November to retrieve the hydrophone due to ships’ schedules and persistent typhoons. The device remained anchored to the seafloor until scientists returned.
Another OSU co-investigator on the project, Joe Haxel, will lead a planned return to Challenger Deep in early 2017, where the researchers will deploy the hydrophone for a longer period of time and attach a deep-ocean camera.
Dziak, Matsumoto, and Haxel all work for NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in the Acoustics Program located at OSU’s Hatfield Marine Science Centeroffsite link. Haxel and Matsumoto are also affiliated with the Cooperative Institute for Marine Resources Studies in Newport, Oregon. The acoustic project in Challenger Deep is one of a number of projects in which the U.S. Coast Guard partners with NOAA to support scientific research.
NOAA’s mission is to understand and predict changes in the Earth's environment, from the depths of the ocean to the surface of the sun, and to conserve and manage our coastal and marine resources. Join us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and our other social media channels.