#seismic testing

Excerpt from this story from Common Dreams:

A coalition of conservation groups sued the Biden administration on Thursday over the U.S. Department of the Interior's recent rule allowing fossil fuel companies to harass polar bears and walruses while searching and drilling for oil and gas in the Southern Beaufort Sea.

Announced last month by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), the rule was quickly blasted as "disturbing" by Kristen Monsell, an attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, one of the groups behind the new federal lawsuit (pdf) in Alaska.

The suit accuses the Interior Department and USFWS of violating the National Environmental Policy Act, the Marine Mammal Protection Act, and the Endangered Species Act.

"The Biden administration flouted the law in allowing oil companies to continue their noisy, harmful onslaught on polar bears," Monsell said Thursday. "We're hopeful the court will overturn this dangerous rule that puts polar bears in the crosshairs."

Monsell, whose group is representing itself and Friends of the Earth in the case, also called out President Joe Biden for promising "bold action to address the climate crisis" while "allowing business-as-usual oil drilling in the Arctic."

Trustees for Alaska is representing the Alaska Wildlife Alliance, Alaska Wilderness League, Defenders of Wildlife, Environment America, and the Sierra Club, which also represents itself. Representatives for the groups outlined how industry activity threatens the region's polar bears.

"'Harassment' is a fancy legal way of saying that an action can disturb or injure polar bears," explained Nicole Schmitt, executive director of Alaska Wildlife Alliance. "This Fish and Wildlife Service rule allows oil and gas companies to harass almost half of the polar bears left in the Southern Beaufort Sea population, double the harassment that occurred under the last regulation."

The Supreme Court of Canada has quashed plans for seismic testing in Nunavut, delivering a major victory to Inuit who argued they were inadequately consulted before the National Energy Board gave oil companies the green light to conduct disruptive testing.

In a unanimous decision handed down Wednesday, written by Justices Karakatsanis and Brown, the top court ruled the NEB's consultation process in Clyde River was "significantly flawed," and gave little, if any, consideration to the treaty rights of Inuit and their reliance on marine mammals for subsistence.

The Inuit have said the sound wave technology a Norwegian consortium sought to use in search of oil would have profoundly impacted marine life in the area.

In a similar decision released Wednesday, the top court ruled unanimously that Enbridge could proceed with its reversal of the Line 9 pipeline in southwestern Ontario, arguing the Chippewas of the Thames were given enough say ahead of the project's construction.

The court sent a shot across the bow in its ruling, warning the NEB and energy project proponents that "any decision affecting Aboriginal or treaty rights made on the basis of inadequate consultation will not be in compliance with the duty to consult."

Excerpt from this New York Times story:

An Alaska Native group failed to meet a critical deadline as part of its proposal to conduct a seismic survey in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the Interior Department announced. The failure effectively kills the survey, which would have determined the location of oil and gas reserves in part of the refuge in anticipation of drilling there.

A department spokeswoman, Melissa Schwarz, said that the group, the Kaktovik Iñupiat Corporation, had not undertaken reconnaissance flights to detect polar bear dens in the proposed survey area as a prelude to sending trucks and other survey equipment rolling across the refuge’s coastal plain this winter.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, an Interior Department agency, had required that three flights be conducted before Feb. 13 as part of the corporation’s request for an authorization that would require extensive efforts to avoid the animals during the full seismic survey.

As a result of the missed deadline, Ms. Schwarz said that the corporation had been advised “that their request is no longer actionable, and the Service does not intend to issue or deny the authorization.”

Separately, another Interior agency, the Bureau of Land Management, has been reviewing the corporation’s application for an overall permit to conduct the survey. The decision not to act on the polar bear authorization makes the issuance of the broader permit moot, effectively killing the proposal.

Excerpt from this story from InsideClimate News:

Employees of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service say they are under pressure from the Trump Administration to deliver a permit that would clear the way for seismic testing in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge by the end of the year.

The permit, called an incidental harassment authorization, allows for a small number of marine mammals—in this case, polar bears—to be disturbed, and is one of at least a dozen permits that must be obtained before seismic testing can begin.

The permitting process normally takes as much as a year to complete.

But a week ago, employees in the Alaska regional office of the wildlife service were told their timeline had been dramatically shortened: They would have four months from start to finish, according to an agency official who requested anonymity because of efforts to crack down on employees who speak out publicly.

Aurelia Skipwith, the director of the Fish and Wildlife Service and a Trump appointee, sent a directive instructing the regional office to get the permit to the agency's headquarters for the next step of the process by Friday, Oct. 30, according to the official, and to finalize it by the end of the year. The deadline left workers scrambling to complete a review based on an application for the seismic testing that isn't yet complete.

If you go to about 3 minutes into the video, you’ll hear Representative Cunningham (Democrat from South Carolina, whose district runs along the coast) questioning the NOAA witness about seismic testing. At 3:30, he tells the other Committee members, the witness and others in the hearing room that he’s going to blast the air gun, with permission. The permission is granted, and off he goes. Although it may seem funny (ok, the stunt made me laugh, particularly because of the serious look on the Representative’s face), the Representative was dead serious about making a point.

Excerpt from this Washington Post article:

A hearing on the threat seismic testing poses to North Atlantic right whales was plodding along Thursday when, seemingly out of nowhere, Rep. Joe Cunningham (D-S.C.) pulled out an air horn and politely asked if he could blast it.

Before that moment at a Natural Resources subcommittee hearing, Cunningham had listened to a Trump administration official testify, over and over, that firing commercial air guns under water every 10 seconds in search of oil and gas deposits over a period of months would have next to no effect on the endangered animals, which use echolocation to communicate, feed, mate and keep track of their babies. It’s why the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration gave five companies permission to conduct tests that could harm the whales last year, said the official, Chris Oliver, an assistant administrator for fisheries.

As committee members engaged in a predictable debate along typical party lines — Republicans in support of testing and President Trump’s energy agenda, Democrats against it — Cunningham reached for the air horn, put his finger on the button and turned to Oliver.

“It’s fair to say seismic air gun blasting is extremely loud and disruptive ... is that correct?” the congressman asked.

“I don’t know exactly how loud it is. I actually never experienced it myself,” Oliver replied.

So Cunningham gave Oliver a taste of the 120-decibel horn. An earsplitting sound filled the small committee room. An audience of about 50 gasped and murmured.

“Was that disruptive?” Cunningham asked

.“It was irritating, but I didn’t find it too disruptive,” Oliver said.

Opponents of seismic testing in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge say it would harm wildlife, including the Porcupine caribou. Credit: Peter Mather/Minden Pictures, via Getty

Excerpt from this New York Times story:

A plan to conduct seismic testing for oil and gas exploration across a large swath of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska has been shelved for this winter, Interior Department officials have said.

The announcement signals at least a temporary victory for environmental groups and scientists who oppose the project, in which large trucks and other heavy equipment would crisscross the refuge’s coastal plain along the Arctic Ocean, using acoustic signals to map underground rock formations that may hold oil and gas reserves.

Steve Wackowski, the department’s senior adviser for Alaska affairs, made the announcement at a hearing Tuesday in Kaktovik, a village within the refuge.

Faith Vander Voort, a department spokeswoman, said the seismic proposal was still pending, and that the company behind it, SAExploration, had asked that the start date be moved to next December.

The postponement will have no direct impact on the Interior Department’s plan to open the coastal plain, 1.5 million acres known as the 1002 Area, to oil and gas development. The department, through the Bureau of Land Management, has said it wants to offer leases for sale this year.

The coastal plain is thought to overlie formations containing billions of barrels of oil, and the Trump administration has been eager to allow development, part of its push for more commercial activities on federal lands.

But the decision means that oil companies that bid on the leases will have to do so without the benefit of new data on potential reserves. The only seismic studies in the refuge were done three decades ago, using less-effective technology. An exploratory well, the only one in the refuge, was drilled around the same time, and its results have remained secret.

Click/tap on the caption to listen to a seismic blast. Pretend you’re a whale. Then listen. From the surface, this is what the blasting process looks like. Ask yourself, as a human, WTF are we doing?

Excerpt from this Mother Nature Network article:

Oil and gas companies rely on seismic airguns to understand what lies under the ocean floor. By bouncing sound waves off the floor, they can uncover potential energy deposits. But scientists and conservationists say such testing should be eliminated because of the unintended consequences on marine animals.

These blasts of compressed air can have powerful impacts on the marine ecosystem, some of which we're just now beginning to understand.

Seismic airguns blast compressed air into the ocean at regular intervals, sometimes as often as once every 10 seconds, according to Woods Hole Coastal and Marine Science Center. Each blast of air creates a sound wave that travels to the ocean floor and bounces back up to the vessel's hydrophones, giving a computer system a picture of the floor's geological features. This data can determine whether or not there's the potential for an oil or gas well. The guns are towed behind a ship in a long chain or net and emit an acoustic pulse as the vessel sails through the ocean.

The ramifications of these pulses can be severe, according to scientists. A 2013 review of seismic airgun studies found that the blasts can cover an area of 115,831 square miles (300,000 square kilometers) and raise the background noise of the ocean by around 20 decibels for weeks or even months. One study cited in the review found that the blasts could be heard 2,485 miles (4,000 kilometers) away from the survey vessel.

Given the sheer scope and noise level of the airguns, their ability to influence marine life is considerable. A 2017 study found that seismic ocean surveys resulted in a two- to threefold increase in the deaths of adult and larval zookplanton, the foundation on which the marine ecosystem is built. The sounds also killed larval krill, the tiny creatures that play an oversized role in the marine food web.