Im an Ocean Engineer and thus, a big part of the curriculum was sonar and transducers. The effect of sonar on animals was often asked about in class and the response was usually that "the Navy doesnt care". Im really glad to see this finally getting more attention from the Navy after being ignored for so long.
I was a Navy surface officer for years. We had required reporting criteria for any marine mammal sighting at least as far back as the 1990s, and we had operating restrictions on the sonar as well. There are a lot of watermen in the Navy, I'm sorry people think we just don't care.
The fundamental tension is that we all love marine life, but someone has to be able to fight the war, and testing weapons and training people is an inextricable part of that.
And the other side ultimately, in a sense fundamentally, has a zero tolerance policy. There's somebody out there who feels every sonar should be dismantled and recycled, never to be used again. And in a law-abiding world, that person's opinion must also be respected, and the senior officers in the Navy take their obligations to the Constitution quite seriously, probably in a rather sophisticated way, where in they have forced society to tell them how far they should go. Unfortunately, that contra-extreme position of no sonar is not going to be realized without a durable world peace where geopolitical tensions can be definitely resolved in all cases without even the threat of violence.
It's not the watermen that I am talking about. Its more the Navy as a research institution. The effects were treated as taboo among the engineers because its a catch 22. It's technology that has a lot of unresolved (and almost definitely negative) effects on marine life, but at the same time the technology is extremely important to things like mapping the seafloor and autonomous navigation.
I don't know much about marine topics, but I thought the primary benefit of sonar was maintaining a safe distance between your vessel and immovable objects that you might run aground on.
Is there some qualitative difference between military sonar applications and the sort that measures more passive threats from the marine environment?
A military active sonar is going to be as loud as possible in order to get the maximum echo signal back from military submarines underwater. I imagine this would be orders of magnitude louder than navigation sonar, not just a little bit.
To build on this and a number of the other comments in here:
There are two general types of sonar. Active, and Passive. Passive sonar involves the process of listening for signals, categorizing their type and origin, and determining their range and bearing. This is a difficult task, though the world's most sophisticated navies can perform this well. It is the preferred method of detecting other submarines (or for submarines to detect other vessels) because it does not give away the location of itself.
Passive of course, has limitations. Variations in water conditions and temperatures, silencing techniques used in adversary craft, a limitations of one's own equipment can make passive difficult, if not impossible in some conditions. And even then, it is a best guess at detection. Passive sonar will give you a pretty close approximation under good conditions and a "well, he's out there" in the worse. (In the most high-tech vessels, it's a bit better than this, but I think I have the gist)
Active on the other hand, is precise. Very precise. It also means, the gig is up, because the emitting craft is heard by everyone, extremely clearly. An active ping that gives a good return can give you precise range and bearing, and in some cases, velocity. It's of limited range, so typically submarines will hunt with passive and use active in the closing stages of an engagement.
Typically when I read about active sonar harming wildlife, it's in reference to the large active arrays carried by destroyers and submarines. Active is used by sonobouys, navigation equipment, and torpedoes as well, but these are typically lower power output.
The active array on a warship however, is generally massive, especially on a modern attack sub. They're powerful, and will produce pings against objects at thousands of yards. (I've even read that some British subs, such as the Trafalgar class, can bounce a signal off the bottom of the seabed, and get a return on a distance object from the reflected bounce.)
These massive arrays are important, because if you suspect an adversary has been tracking you passively, but you can't find them, then active scan can save you by alerting you to where they are. Tactically, it is a last ditch option, or the closing move in an engagement, and it's not unusual to see a safety cover over the switch to an active array. But it does have a purpose, and the Navy, justifiably so, does need to train with it.
But it does come with a cost, and it won't take long for one to search google for images of whale and dolphins with their ears literally blown to shreds because of an active scan.
I sympathize with both sides on this one, and I'm glad a settlement was reached that hopefully produces a good compromise.
Is not only a question of sympathy. One of the sides is breaking the law. In most countries is a crime to harass or kill a protected or critically endangered species.
The typical actitude in the last years was "dunno what happened, not my problem and the next week we'll be in Melbourne so, good luck".
And really is a problem that you created for somebody because:
1-A dead whale floating 10cm under the surface could easily wander with the sea currents, go unnoticed and crash with a ferry.
2-A dozen of rotten 2500 Kg carcasses stranding in a beach is a public emergence. It will contaminate waters and sand used by literally millions of tourists with dangerous bacteria and the most foetid rancid fat that you can imagine. Is expensive to clean the area again.
3-Is also a potential "bomb", because rotten cetaceans explode, literally. I have stabbed several.
4-The blubber floats. If in the water will atract sharks from open sea to coastal areas and beaches.
5-You could kill a fisherman by mistake with your sonar, or explode the ears of a silicon valley tycoon or an US senator enjoying an expensive diving holidays with the family, or whatever...
So is obvious that is in our best interest to put some limits to the army paranoia. You could estimate the probability of a third country making a first strike and starting a war in a scenery of peace, and I bet that is very low.
Is obvious also that we need to design much better 'high energy' sonars (most sonars are not a problem at all) or just to improve satellite surveillance, or maybe create autonomous robot-cameras that can go and explore silently a 'treat' instead to blow up all just because you get nervous...
And is in our best interest also to protect cetaceans, because an unbalanced marine ecosystem without cetaceans means probably lots of mesopelagic squids (unedible), much less fishes and famine for millions of humans.
> There are a lot of watermen in the Navy, I'm sorry people think we just don't care.
I think that the notion is that "The Navy", as an institution, does not care, to which I would offer, "The Navy" as an institution has no capacity to care or not care, only individuals and groups of them within it do.
I think it's reasonable to comment on whether institutions "care" or not about negative externalities by looking at the policies they have in place to mitigate them.
Why don't you think institutions can be modeled as an aggregation of the participants? I have no problem seeing the behavior of ants as collectively purposeful even though individual ants make poor conversation partners. You might as well say that individual humans have no capacity to feel, only individual cells within the body are capable of reacting to stimuli.
I'm not being a contrarian here; while I don't want to write a wall of text to convince you I absolutely believe in the notion of collective consciousness ass an emergent complex phenomenon that is amenable to quantitative analysis under certain circumstances (eg institutional persistence vs. ad-hoc flocking behavior in crowds).
They have known about this for years; they have either finished the testing OR they have completed their purpose with regards to the weapon. My guess is the later
Given this has been on going for a 15 years we know about, and most likely another 5-10 years before the public noticed it does make me wonder what they were up to 20+ years of Sonar abuse towards animals. Feels more like they had a plan rather than simply testing a weapon.
I have no idea what sonar frequencies are what, but to expand on your point, sonar is basically the only kind of sensor that works underwater. Radar and sight are basically useless.
Sonar is really all you have to see underwater, and is used heavily for scientific purposes, not only military purposes. Ocean-floor mapping is done with sonar. Active sonar of the kind that hurts whales is not in frequent use by deployed military vessels on military or surveillance missions because, while it gets you a good picture, it also announces "HERE I AM!!!" to the entire world.
I am not knowledgeable on acoustics, let alone acoustic dissipation or acoustics in water - but I can see logic behind the argument that LFA sonar causes a problem for whales.
I did a little digging, and it seems that it's not really appropriate to compare underwater decibel measurements with decibel measurements in air. For example, [0] discusses whales that generate clicks at 230 dB, and suggests that that is "equivalent to 170 decibels on land."
I'm not sure if it's even possible to get to 240 dB in air... Ah, an article on wikipedia sort of backs me up: [1] says that, at 1 atmosphere of pressure in air, the maximum loudness for undistorted sound is around 194 dB. Anything louder would be a shockwave.
> Sonar is not a weapon; it's a sensor system intended to discover enemy submarines.
When a friend was working on sonar software they had extremely rigorous safety controls in place when working in the same room as a test rig. Pings could kill you. At a minimum you would shatter your ear drum.
The medium is different. Sound travels 4 times further and faster in water than air. Dolphins even use sound to stun their prey.
Sound in water is a more effective weapon. The ping of a sonar is a weapon within the medium of water. A quick search:
"There are no noise-cancelling headphones to stop the U.S. Navy's 235-decibel pressure waves of unbearable pinging and metallic shrieking. At 200 Db, the vibrations can rupture your lungs, and above 210 Db, the lethal noise can bore straight through your brain until it haemorrhages that delicate tissue. If you're not deaf after this devastating sonar blast, you're dead."
Their function is to both perform War and to project enough strength that War is undesirable to other parties.
What is the reasonable argument that this institution should prioritize Whale protection in that continuum?
I am arguing against you, but I am pro-whale, pro-dolphin, pro-environment. I am trying to make the point that "why not?" is a silly question. It's not simple. People need to fight for doing the right thing here. The Navy's job is "war." If your institution is in possession of & has the opportunity to use nuclear weapons, you aren't spending time focusing on "doing nice things".
It's not "possible", it is certain and documented. 155 whales and dolphins killed in 5 years and over 2000 injured [0]. And by accounts from marine biologists, they are dying agonizing deaths.
Destroying the environment is half of what the military does during wartime. So long as we have militaries, it's hard to see a future where we're not burning cities, bombing bridges and other critical infrastructure, and driving around highly environmentally unfriendly tanks, planes, and warships.
Well, to be fair, the military is also the largest and most capable humanitarian organization at the disposal of the world's governments. To think their sole purpose is destruction for the sake of destruction is also a bit of an oversimplification, peacekeeping is a useful role as well.
That's more likely to be the National Guard or something like that. Which is military indeed, but not the same type of military that we're talking about here.
The National Guard is as equipped to kill as any element of the regular military. NG units have served in combat roles in pick-a-conflict-in-recent-memory.
That's just the US, of course. Pick a natural disaster anywhere in the world - the military(or militaries) of the region are the first to respond and form the basis of the relief efforts thereafter.
Agree that we should expect more of military and government, but given the fact that a lawsuit was required here and the rampant abuses in the name of national security, we are a long ways off.
> So we must just accept the fact that military is there to destroy environments and they just don't really care?
No, the military is there to win wars. When you're in a fight for your life, you don't much care if you trample on a bush, or even break your own bones.
It's not binary. It's a trade-off that potentially decreases their capabilities and readiness. We might weigh the calculus differently (fewer dead whales) but it's not as simple as saying they don't care.
Search for "navy rescues people" and you will see that the military and other navies around the world do far more than fight and are trained to do far more than fight and do so willingly and without regard for their own safety, every day of every year.
Maybe they should reconsider their position them for practical 'poorpoises', like saving the last 55 maui's dolphins remaining on earth, or preserving the truly unique native aquatic vertebrates frequenting the coasts of Hawaii in their annual migration.
Sound travels at 0.9 miles by second in the sea, so this poses a very interesting question about what should be a theoretical safe distance for a sonar. Maybe somebody here could answer this. I hope they keep the keys for this engine safe and not sound in any case.
> Sound travels at 0.9 miles by second in the sea, so this poses a very interesting question about what should be a theoretical safe distance for a sonar. Maybe somebody here could answer this. I hope they keep the keys for this engine safe and not sound in any case.
Speed doesn't matter, it's all about the wavefront. The radar equation provides a rough guide here, in that the power of the signal drops off at a ratio proportional to the distance squared, the r^2 dependency. I have no idea what the rest of the terms in that equation would be, though, as I have only ever done the calculations for RF in air.
Actually, from my reading on the subject, they're required to stop what they're doing if they see any wildlife in the area. It's the same with other developed navies for the most part.
It doesn't always happen, but I got the impression that it does most of the time(and coincidentally is a source of frustration on their part as they have to wait for the wildlife to leave).
I can't seem to find the article I was reading about this, but in the comments there were a number of people claiming to be current or former members of various navies, and their responses were mostly along those lines. Some people said they willingly ignored those requirements, however.
Devil's Advocate: why should they? It's not part of their mission. The armed forces of the United States exist to defend the nation. Full stop.
Saying that the USN doesn't care about whales is like complaining that Susan G. Komen doesn't care about landmines. It doesn't mean that whale-killing or landmine use is any less repellant, but expecting either to do something about it is out of scope.
I find it amazing that before we started polluting the sea with propeller noise and sonar, whales basically had a global communication network. Whalesong could be heard for thousands and thousands of miles.
There's a pretty good book called "War of the Whales" by Joshua Horwitz that discusses the work of whale researcher Ken Balcomb to convince the Navy to limit sonar operations.
Quotes in "whale-harming" are totally unnecessary. Is a well known fact that naval practices kill whales. An example; massive strandings in Canary islands were a big problem until Spain ban the use of navy sonars in its shores. Result: No more cases of entire groups of several agonizing whales in the beach since them. Not a single one.
Is not only that the pressure wave generated will burst the inner ear and lungs of some nice animals. Humans have lungs also. There is probably a real danger of death for any human diving at many miles of distance with those practices (that normally are not disclosed to the big public in advance).
I wouldn't read those quotations as indicating skepticism that the sonar harms whales but, rather, as just another case of the BBC's odd headline-writing practices. I often find the BBC quoting things in headlines in ways that seem unnecessary and awkward. As in this case, the quotations sometimes give the amusing impression that the BBC is calling obvious or trivial propositions into doubt. Like this one:
BBC 'to launch personalised iPlayer'
I think they're trying to remain scrupulously neutral by quoting as much material as possible, but they often overshoot to convey skepticism about their own article.
The use of quotation marks to indicate sarcasm or doubt is pretty new, while using them to just mean "this is literal text from elsewhere" is much older. Not to say the new usage is somehow "wrong" but neither would I call the BBC's usage odd.
I don't have a strong view about this, and I certainly understand why the BBC is using quotation marks in the way it is. But if I were an editor at the BBC, I think I would be uncomfortable with the fact that the quotations communicate the wrong message to so many readers -- and, worse, mistakenly suggest that my publication is being snarky or skeptical of the claims highlighted in the headline. This seems like very much the opposite of the quotation marks' desired effect.
> Kowtowing to the lowest common denominator shouldn't be done lightly
Certainly not when you put it like that! But you might also call it "communicating effectively with your audience." So maybe kowtowing isn't so bad after all when it just involves responding to the linguistic conventions observed by your readers, and the goal is simply communication.
I also don't know that people who read quotation marks as connoting doubt, in the absence of any other evident reason for them, can fairly be called "the lowest common denominator."
> The use of quotation marks to indicate sarcasm or doubt is pretty new
I'm not sure that's true. A writer will always have some reason to use literal quotations instead of their own rendition of things. What makes you certain that skepticism is only a recent addition to the list of possible such reasons?
An extensive scope of reading material, most likely. If you like reading enough to read across multiple decades and centuries then one can usefully make such observations from one's personal corpus. This isn't something that can be easily automated as machine learning is not yet that good at the semantic level, but I concur with the grandparent poster that the ironic use of quotation marks is a relatively new journalistic trend.
Apart from the absurd overuse of quotation marks that you linked, "remaining scrupulously neutral" is indeed a general editorial policy of the BBC. They tend to "report the controversy" - i.e. report that "some people think A, while others think B" rather than weighing the factual support or veracity of either position.
However everyone still has their own personal biases, and from time to time the hosts do inject their personal positions on the less scripted programs (eg the BBC World Service radio program). I actually dislike this as well, because it's not factually-based or institutionally overseen. It's just a host deciding to mock a position or slam a guest on his own. There is a difference between journalism and editorializing, and I have a particular problem when an institution that has a policy of being scrupulously neutral will refuse to touch factual bias but allows their hosts to go off and editorialize. It's not all that frequent, but it really bugs me when I hear it happen.
Another problem is that there's always bias just from what stories get selected as newsworthy and what positions are represented within them. There's an Overton Window inherently represented by that. Overall I do think the BBC does a pretty good job on that one at least.
As an aside - try watching CSPAN after a big state event or something when they do the call-ins. They have the most hilariously stone-faced hosts I've ever seen. To avoid the appearance of bias they will take literally anyone, and they get the full range of people, both in political opinions and sanity. "I THINK THAT OBAMA IS A SECRET CHRONONAUT FROM MARS! HE..." "Thank you caller. Now to Susan from Rhode Island,...". They must have their emotions surgically removed or something.
