Sonar threat from US military

Staff · Issue 2, Oct/Nov 2001 · pp. 38–39

The three of us have never teamed up like this before. But we all share something in common: a deep love of the ocean and marine mammals. That’s why we’re very disturbed by a U.S. military program that, if approved, will soon be bombarding millions of whales and dolphins around the world with intense noise. You may have read about the U.S. Navy’s “Low- Frequency Active” (LFA) sonar program. The military has been testing this new, high-powered system in secret for years. Now, the Navy wants to deploy it across 80 percent of our planet’s oceans. LFA sonar is designed to detect enemy submarines by flooding vast expanses of the oceans with sound. Leaving aside the military wisdom of this sonar — which is still in dispute — the environmental dangers are becoming increasingly clear. Here’s the problem: LFA noise is billions of times more intense than that known to disturb whale migration and c…