ОК. Вот несколько прошлогодних статей на этот счет и совсем недавняя в Вашингтон Пост. Если интересно - могу копнуть поглубже в историю.
С наилучшими пожеланиями,
Е. Мясников
Washington Post
October 9, 2003
Pg. 3
Navy Sonar May Give Whales The 'Bends'
Condition Similar to Decompression Sickness Found in Mammals Beached on Canary Islands
By Marc Kaufman, Washington Post Staff Writer
High-powered sonar from Navy ships appears to be giving whales and other marine mammals a version of the bends, causing them to develop dangerous gas bubbles in some tissues and blood vessels and to beach themselves and die, according to a study published yesterday in the journal Nature.
Reporting on beaked whales that were stranded in the Canary Islands soon after an international naval exercise last year, researchers for the first time found a condition similar to decompression sickness in 10 of 14 dead animals.
The new data begin to explain how and why high-decibel mid-frequency sonar used by the U.S. Navy and other military fleets appears to cause some deep-diving marine mammals to die. Although the bends was previously unheard of in whales, dolphins and porpoises, the British and Spanish researchers concluded that a marine mammal version of decompression sickness was "the most likely cause" of the Canary Island strandings.
"This is the best data we've ever seen from a sonar-related stranding," said Roger Gentry, coordinator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries Acoustics Team. He said NOAA will hold a workshop this year with the authors and others in the field to assess the new information and try to reach scientific conclusions.
The new research from the Canary Islands suggests two possible explanations for how the gas bubbles harm the whales. One is similar to the way humans get the bends: The whales panic at the sound of the loud sonar noises and rise too quickly from deep water. As they rise, nitrogen bubbles can be formed from the rapid change in pressure and cause the bends. The other hypothesis involves bubble formation caused directly by the sonar on gas nuclei, or bubble "precursors," in whale tissues that are already highly saturated with nitrogen.
Gentry said the scientific community remains skeptical that rapid ascents are causing the bubbles to form. "From an evolutionary point of view, it does not seem likely," he said. "Whales have been diving like this forever, and should have evolved mechanisms so they wouldn't succumb to decompression."
The Canary Island strandings and research involve mid-frequency (or pitch) sonar coming from Spanish-led, international naval maneuvers that included only one American destroyer. But they could affect a contentious debate over the U.S. Navy's desire to deploy very loud low-frequency sonar around the world to detect "quiet" submarines. That effort was stopped in August in California by a federal magistrate who said the government had violated environmental laws in giving the Navy permission to deploy the new sonar globally.
"We know there is a connection between military sonar and strandings, and now we're making progress on the physical mechanism causing them," said Joel R. Reynolds, an attorney with the National Resources Defense Council, which sued the government over the low-frequency sonar. "This is very compelling scientific evidence."
Lt. Cmdr. Joseph A. "Cappy" Surette, a Navy spokesman, said officials are still studying the Nature article. But he said the Navy takes many steps to avoid harming sea creatures and that the new sonar technology is necessary.
"Submarines are becoming an increasingly serious threat to the U.S. Navy," he said. "Diesel submarines have become increasingly difficult to detect and are proliferating around the world."
He also said that "there is no evidence of any negative impact on marine mammals" in areas where the new low-frequency sonar has been tested.
The legal problems faced by the new Navy sonar system, called the Surveillance Towed Array Sensor System -- Low Frequency Active (SURTASS-LFA), have upset some in Congress and helped spur successful efforts to pass legislation to limit the reach of environmental laws that affect the Defense Department. The legislation, part of the Defense Department appropriations bill, is in conference. The House language broadly exempts the Defense Department from provisions of the Endangered Species Act and the Marine Mammal Protection Act, while the Senate language is considerably less limiting.
Several mass beachings of whales and dolphins have been tied to high-decibel sonar since the phenomenon was first identified in 1996, and Navy researchers are going back to see whether other strandings can be connected with nearby Navy sonar use.
Whales and other marine mammals are highly sensitive to sound and use it to communicate. Different species hear at different frequencies, and so are affected by various kinds of sonar. The low-frequency sonar that the Navy wants to use around the globe operates at the sound level used by the largest, and some of the most endangered, whales.
The whales stranded in the Canary Islands are beaked whales, the same kind killed in a similar stranding involving sonar in the Bahamas in 2000. Beaked whales are relatively small and dive deeper than most to feed on squid.
The Navy initially said that its sonar had no connection with the 2000 stranding, but a later inquiry ruled out all other possibilities and concluded the sonar most likely caused the deaths.
The research published yesterday in Nature was conducted by scientists at the Zoological Society of London and the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria in Spain. The English researchers also reported that six dolphins and one beaked whale that had stranded along British shores between 1992 and 2003 had gas bubbles in their blood vessels.
The New York Times
November 17, 2002
Navy to Limit Sonar Testing Thought to Hurt Sea Mammals
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
AN FRANCISCO, Nov. 16 — The Navy has agreed to scale back temporarily the testing of a new sonar system designed to detect enemy submarines.
The agreement was reached on Friday after months of protests by environmentalists and two weeks after a federal magistrate judge blocked the testing, citing concerns about marine life.
The accord is a compromise between the government and the ecologists who filed a lawsuit over the testing. It will last seven months while the Navy's operating permit is challenged in federal court.
Magistrate Judge Elizabeth LaPorte had already blocked the Navy from experimenting with the system, which was to be routinely tested throughout the world's oceans.
The Navy had planned to test the system in about 14 million square miles of ocean. Under the agreement, the Navy will limit its tests to about a million square miles of remote ocean around the Mariana Islands.
"It's the least sensitive area of ocean we could get," said Andrew Wetzler, an lawyer with the Natural Resources Defense Council, which says the Navy system can harass or kill marine mammals.
The sonar system can send signals hundreds of miles. It can be as loud as 215 decibels, as much noise as a twin-engine F-15 fighter jet makes when it takes off.
The agreement does not prevent the Navy from using the system to detect modern, quiet submarines in wartime, and it acknowledges that the Navy must be allowed to train with it.
Neither the Navy nor the Justice Department returned calls seeking comment. The judge ordered all discussions between the environmental group and the Navy to remain confidential.
The Natural Resources Defense Council said Navy sonar used in March 2000 may have caused at least 16 whales and 2 dolphins to beach themselves on islands in the Bahamas. Eight whales died, and scientists found bleeding around their brains and ear bones, injuries consistent with exposure to loud noise.
The New York Times
November 6, 2002
Whales and Sonar
here have been too many cases in recent years of whales coming to grief in areas where Navy ships have been operating loud sonars to detect submarines. Two years ago, seven whales beached themselves and died in the Bahamas after an American Navy battle group passed by and activated its sonars. Less than two months ago, 15 whales beached themselves in the Canary Islands during NATO naval exercises in nearby waters, mimicking a similar whale beaching in Greece in 1996. Such incidents are a reminder that many marine mammals depend on their sensitive hearing to communicate, find food, mate and survive. Too much noise can harm or even kill them.
Now, in the latest struggle over noisy marine environments, a federal judge has temporarily halted the Navy's plans to use loud low-frequency sonar waves to search for quiet submarines hundreds of nautical miles away. The new sonar technology operates at a lower frequency than the sonars implicated in the Bahamas beachings, and it is not clear how much damage it would actually cause. But last week a federal magistrate in San Francisco, Elizabeth LaPorte, granted a preliminary injunction, suggesting that environmental groups may well be right about the need to provide greater protection for marine mammals whose behavior may be disrupted by the sonar.
No one seeks to block use of the sonar in wartime or national emergencies. But more restrictions may be needed on its use for training and testing in peacetime.
Environmental Groups, Navy Square Off on Sonar System
Sept. 11 Altered the Dispute Over Survival of Large Whales
By Marc Kaufman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, April 15, 2002; Page A03
For more than a decade, the Navy has been developing a revolutionary sonar system designed to detect new "quiet" submarines of the future by sending out extremely loud, low-frequency pings around the globe.
At the same time, environmentalists and oceanographers have grown increasingly worried that the intense sound waves emitted by the new sonar would seriously confuse, injure and eventually kill noise-sensitive marine mammals, and large whales in particular.
Now, with the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) on the verge of making a final decision on whether to allow deployment of the new low-frequency sonar -- and, if so, with what restrictions -- the Navy and its critics have intensified their competing campaigns to have it quickly approved or permanently sidetracked.
Disputes between the military and environmentalists are nothing new. But the Navy sonar controversy is approaching a climax in what both proponents and opponents say is a new atmosphere created by the Sept. 11 attacks.
The military has been for some time increasingly concerned about environmental "encroachments" of all kinds -- conservation-based restrictions on how training camps and bombing ranges can be used, and now on deploying new technology. Military leaders say the time has arrived to address these concerns, and Congress appears increasingly sympathetic to this viewpoint.
As a result, the Pentagon is circulating within the Bush administration a draft of a proposed bill that would greatly limit the reach of environmental laws on military training and deployment -- formally prohibiting the federal government from placing the conservation of public lands or the protection of endangered species above the needs of military preparedness.
The bill would make it far more difficult to delay projects such as the new sonar system because of concern over its effects on whales. More broadly, it could change how basic pollution-control laws are enforced on military bases, and it would eliminate another environmental challenge that has especially outraged defense officials and some members of Congress. After a federal judge ruled this month that the Navy was violating the Migratory Bird Treaty Act by using as a bombing range an island in the Pacific with protected birds, officials were incensed that the training might have to stop. Under the draft bill, it would not be affected.
Environmentalists acknowledge that since the September terrorist attacks, it has become more difficult to argue that the environment can be preserved as before without sacrificing national preparedness and security. But they are nonetheless planning for a lawsuit to block the sonar system if it is approved, and for a political campaign to resist the broader legislation that they expect will be introduced soon.
The sonar dispute is especially emotional because it pits the nation's long-embraced goal of protecting whales against the military's essential objective of protecting its troops. It has also escalated because marine biologists have grown increasingly concerned about the dangers of all kinds of noise pollution in the oceans.
Marine mammals, and whales in particular, have a sense of hearing that is far more sensitive than their sight, and they rely on sound to avoid dangers, to find food and to communicate with one another. Yet the growing jumble of sound -- from commercial and military shipping, from underwater gas and oil exploration, from other industrial development and now from "active" sonar -- is threatening those abilities.
"It is absolutely necessary to be worried about sound if we don't want to negatively impact marine creatures," said Darlene Ketten, an auditory specialist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and a member of an ongoing National Academy of Sciences research effort into ocean noise.
Speaking at a recent House Armed Services subcommittee hearing on environmental "encroachments," William Hogarth, assistant administrator for fisheries at the NMFS, went further, saying that "from a marine mammal standpoint, probably the number one issue is acoustics and noise in the marine environment."
But among policymakers, nothing is more important now than security. And the Navy has been arguing for years that it needs low-frequency sonar to protect against submarine threats.
The new sonar, part of the Surveillance Towed Array Sensor System (SURTASS), would allow the Navy to detect and track quiet submarines -- which don't create the noise that can be followed through "passive" sonar -- and to do it at a much longer range. The low frequencies are essential to the system because they travel much farther underwater than the higher frequencies now employed.
The Navy says it will forgo use of its low-frequency active sonar in the Arctic and Antarctic, as well as in some especially sensitive regions and coastal areas, and will take broad precautions to make sure whales and dolphins are not nearby when it sends out its blasts. "Quite frankly, a lot of people are taking shots at potential problems, at what they think are gaps in the data, because the actual problems are not appearing," said Joseph Johnson, a civilian project manager for the sonar system. "We've taken a hard look and are comfortable we can do this safely."
But environmental groups are highly skeptical, especially because they contend the Navy conducted secret sonar testing and initiated deployment without preparing a required environmental impact statement. The new system uses 18 sets of speakers to send out sounds -- at decibel levels comparable to those of a jet taking off -- for more than a minute at a time.
"What we talk about with ocean noise and a noisemaker of this intensity is something that can impact a broad range of species, up and down the food chain," said Michael Jasny, a senior policy analyst with the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), which has led the opposition to low-frequency sonar. "This decision by NMFS is so important because it will determine, to a very large extent, the government's ability to effectively regulate a raft of other systems in the works, too."
Conservationists became especially concerned after an incident in March 2000 in which 17 marine mammals became stranded on land in the Bahamas. The Navy initially said its sonar had nothing to do with the stranding. But after studies showed the fatal trauma in six of the animals was caused by underwater noise, the Navy acknowledged in January that its sonar was in part responsible.
All six animals that died were beaked whales, a smaller species known to be deep divers and therefore very sensitive to noise. But two large Minke whales also stranded, raising concerns about potentially broad effects from sonar.
Since then, few of the approximately 35 beaked whales normally seen in the area have returned, according to marine researcher Kenneth Balcomb, of the Bahamas Marine Mammal Survey. Only two came back within two years, a disappearance that Balcomb called "unprecedented."
The sonar used by the Navy in the Bahamas was a conventional mid-frequency system, and there has been intense scientific debate about whether the new low-frequency sonar could have the same effects. In its environmental impact statement, which the Navy initiated under pressure, the Navy found no significant harm to marine mammals from the low-frequency sound blasts.
But there were effects. Half of the humpback whales that were tracked temporarily stopped their songs when the loud sonar pings reached them. The Marine Mammal Commission, a federal advisory group, said that observation was worrisome and suggested there could be long-term consequences.
The debate is complicated further by the likelihood that loud and far-reaching sonar is being developed by other countries. Navy officials have said that France and Russia have deployed similar low-frequency sonars, and environmental groups say many other nations are working on them, too. This creates the possibility of wide-scale sonar proliferation, and of whales and dolphins being bombarded by sound waves from many directions.
The NMFS already gave a preliminary restricted approval to the Navy's low-frequency sonar last year, but that was before the Navy's role in the Bahamas strandings was determined. It was also before some of the opposition to low-frequency sonar became apparent. Soon after that decision, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) said in a statement, "I am disturbed by the growing scientific evidence that low-frequency active sonar has a devastating impact" on whales and dolphins. Her office said many constituents oppose the new sonar, and that she is following the issue closely.
But the preliminary ruling was before Sept. 11 as well, and Defense Department officials and members of Congress now appear less likely to accept restrictions on how and where the new sonar might be used. The language of the anti-encroachment bill now circulating -- called the Sustainable Defense Readiness and Environmental Protection Act -- gives a greater weight to military concerns over environmental ones.
At the House subcommittee hearing last month, members of Congress made clear they were open to the administration's efforts at "re-balancing" the military-environment equation. "I want protection of our endangered species. I want protection of our wetlands. I want a balance in what we do as a society," said Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.) in a typical comment. "But things are very much out of control and out of balance." The subcommittee is expected to have a bill ready later this month.
Environmental groups are equally concerned and are preparing for a prolonged contest over low-frequency sonar and related military issues -- probably in court and in Congress. "Whatever [the federal agency] decides on sonar, I don't think it will be the final word on the subject," said Jasny of the NRDC.
Кстати (+) - Е. Мясников13.10.2003 11:46:23 (79, 215 b)
