Whale territory worries about seismic oil testing

NAGS HEAD, N.C. – As early as next spring, the boom of seismic cannons will sound under the Atlantic Ocean as the first oil and gas exploration allowed off the East Coast in three decades gets underway.

While federal officials and the oil and gas industry characterize the exploration as benign, Nags Head Mayor Bob Edwards said he's terrified about what the intense sound waves can do to dolphins and endangered right whales, of which only 500 remain.

"I just can't understand how anybody would propose something that's going to be just a rape of the East Coast, endangering whales and dolphins and turtles and fish," he said.

The seismic surveys are done with compressed air guns that blast under the sea, repeated every 10 seconds or so for weeks at a time. Echoes from the blasts are used to produce three-dimensional maps that help geologists figure out whether rock formations are likely to contain fossil fuels.

The federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management approved opening an area of the Atlantic Coast from Delaware to Florida for the seismic blasts, saying there "has been no documented scientific evidence" that they harm marine mammals.

Even among federal scientists, though, there is concern over what the pulses of sound can do to the communication of whales and other marine life that use sound to locate food and mates.

"It's been pretty well documented that seismic surveys have disrupted animal behavior and animal communication," said Danielle Cholewiak, a senior acoustics researcher for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Political leaders in North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia lobbied President Obama to approve the seismic testing to assess how much oil and natural gas lies off the East Coast, with the hope that Obama will allow offshore drilling that brings jobs.

In coastal towns that rely on tourism, such as Nags Head on North Carolina's Outer Banks, the idea of drilling into the ocean is contentious.

A spill would devastate the local tourism industry, said Paul Manning, who owns the Front Porch Cafe on the Outer Banks. Manning argues that the cash from opening up the Atlantic Ocean to drilling would largely go to ports like Wilmington, N.C., or Virginia's Hampton Roads area.

Jessica Weiss Taylor, who leads the Outer Banks Center for Dolphin Research, worries about dolphins. "There is a likely chance they would be affected," she said.

The environmental group Oceana says the seismic blasts threaten to injure or kill thousands of Atlantic marine mammals, and even pose a threat to the area's fisheries. Oceana has launched a campaign calling on Obama to reverse his approval.

The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management said it will restrict when the cannons are fired during whale migration and will require onboard spotters and shut down activities when they are too close.

George Ioup, a physics professor at the University of New Orleans, said large Atlantic whales operate at low frequencies and will hear the booms. An "extraordinary amount of caution" is needed if there's seismic exploration near spawning or feeding grounds of such whales, he said.