NBC Nightly News with Tom Llamas - NBC on Earth: Seismic Testing Controversy

Episode Date: March 17, 2019

After the Trump administration approved seismic testing that could be a first step to exploratory drilling, scientists warn that the extreme noise could put endangered whales and other marine life at risk. Chief Environmental Affairs Correspondent Anne Thompson reports on the controversy bubbling up along the Eastern Seaboard.

The ocean is an acoustic world, so marine life like dolphins and whales rely on sound to communicate, find mates, find food, and avoid predators. In the waters of the Atlantic, there's a legal and political storm over the sounds underneath. Seismic testing to find oil and gas. The prevailing scientific information is that seismic activity does not result in mortality or even serious injury. Rather, the prevailing science is it does not. I would acknowledge there are other sublethal energetic effects. Well, here's the thing about seismic testing. It's so loud that it can be heard a thousand miles away. And so it actually influences a huge section of ocean.

And in the case of the seismic proposal for the east coast of the United States, we're looking at five vessels operating nearly simultaneously for a whole year. The Trump administration has approved seismic testing along the Atlantic coast from Delaware to mid-Florida. Air guns dragged behind a vessel emit sound waves every 10 seconds that penetrate the seabed. The reflected pulses create a map of the oil and gas deposits below. I'm Anne Thompson, and this is NBC on Earth. At a recent House Natural Resources Subcommittee hearing on the North Atlantic right whale, South Carolina Congressman Joe Cunningham had an unusual request for the chair. Mr. Chair, I'd ask for unanimous consent to sound an air horn in committee.

I'd like to give anyone an opportunity to leave if they would find it bothersome. Was that disruptive, Mr. Oliver? So it was irritating, but I don but I didn't find it particularly disruptive. What about every, say, 10 seconds? Like seismic air gun blasting goes on for days, weeks, months. The congressman was trying to replicate the sound of seismic testing for the committee. But had he truly replicated it, he would have had to blast the air horn every 10 seconds. Testifying was Chris Oliver, the assistant administrator for NOAA Fisheries.

The prevailing scientific information is that seismic activity does not result in mortality or even serious injury. Rather, the prevailing science is it does not. I would acknowledge there are other sublethal energetic effects. Noah reviewed the permits, which allow for disrupting but not killing marine mammals. There is evidence that the cumulative effects of acoustics can affect foraging behavior, calving, breeding behavior. It basically sublethal effects relative to whale energetics, yes. During the hearing, there were a lot of questions about seismic testing. We have to find a negligible impact when we're asked to review these authorization requests and include mitigation monitoring and

reporting requirements that result in the least practical adverse impact. And if we're able to do so, and we think that we've done so with some what we believe are significant mitigation measures, including the 90-kilometer closure, as well as multiple critical habitat and calving area closures that remain year-round, along with the provision for shutdown if whales are detected within a mile and a half. So we believe collectively those satisfy the standards that we are authorized to evaluate under the Marine Mammal Protection Act. But the environmental groups opposing seismic tests don't think the mitigation measures work. Diane Hoskins is the campaign director at Oceana.

The ocean is an acoustic world, so marine life like dolphins and whales rely on sound to communicate, find mates, find food, and avoid predators, really the essential basic functions of living in the ocean. And this disrupts all of that. How does it affect these dolphins and whales? So it can affect their behavior. They can move away from their food sources. There are some animals who depend on food sources in a very specific place and if the blasting begins they can't go there to find their food. So in this permit the oil and gas companies say, look, we're not going to kill any dolphins and whales. We're just going to harass them. Isn't that the better option?

Well, we dispute some of those facts. And so that's why we've sued the government in these authorizations. We're deeply concerned about the potential for catastrophic impacts. The Marine Mammals Protection Act, does this preclude anybody from doing this kind of seismic testing? So we think that under the Marine Mammal Protection Act, they have some significant obligations under the law to ensure that they do not have adverse impacts to populations. We don't think they've proven that in these authorizations, and that's what we're fighting. Is this an adverse impact? Seismic air gun blasting is extremely loud. It could injure, harm, or even kill marine life from the smallest zooplankton all the way up to the largest, like the North Atlantic right whale.

I'm at the New England Aquarium in Boston with their senior scientist and director of ocean health, Dr. Rosalind Rowland. We're standing in front of the penguin exhibit, but above us... Ros, is this a right whale skeleton? That is. That's the skeleton of a young right whale. It was probably a juvenile under eight or nine. How can you tell it was a young whale? Because it's small, believe it or not. No. Yeah. Right whales are huge.

They get up to 60, 65 feet and about 50 tons in weight. Most people don't realize that there's a lot of noise underwater in the ocean. This is mainly noise from ship propellers. Most of our goods and services are transported by large ships. And the engines and the propellers put out a lot of low-frequency noise underwater that we can't hear above the water. And what does that do to the fish who live in the ocean? So it affects fish, but my study has been particularly to do with whales. And large whales like North Atlantic right whales and other large whales communicate in this low frequency, the same frequency band that ship noise is putting into the ocean, all this pollution.

So they are essentially drowning out the right whale communication sounds. Does that confuse the right whales? We think that it does. We think that it makes it hard for them to hear each other, for mothers to find calves, for them to communicate about food, for them to navigate, to hear predators coming. These animals live by sound. They're sound-based animals, much as we live by vision. They require sound to live in their environment, and these ships are masking all that sound that they use.

And if you add seismic testing to that? Oh, that's just like throwing in huge explosions, multiple explosions for weeks on end and months on end and years on end that is on top of this background noise from the ships. And what could all that sound, all that noise do to right whales? Well we know from work that we've done that whales will avoid areas where there's a lot of noise. But the work that we've done in this lab has shown that their stress levels increase when they're exposed to higher levels of ship noise. And that has implications for their health. And we're talking about chronic stress from repeated noise over long periods of time can directly shut down

reproduction. And we know we have a problem with calving in this population, this endangered population. So it affects reproduction, can lower their immune system threshold. So there'll be more susceptible to diseases and can stunt the growth rate of young whales. So you did a study looking at the unintended consequence of September 11th. And you saw a reduction in shipping. We saw a reduction in shipping in the North Atlantic after September 11th. How did that affect the right whale population? Right. After September 11th, of course, in 2001, the country was paralyzed and shipping ports shut down and airplane traffic died.

And we were working in the Bay of Fundy and the shipping traffic traffic dropped dramatically after September 11th, as did the underwater noise levels. We had a scientist with us taking recordings before and after September 11th of underwater noise and the low frequency noise dropped along with the ship traffic. At the same time, we were measuring hormones in the whales before and after September 11th of underwater noise and the low frequency noise dropped along with the ship traffic. At the same time we were measuring hormones in the whales before and after September 11th and we saw a significant drop in their stress levels when the ship traffic died off after September 11th. What kind of noise reduction did you see? Well it was the low frequency noise spectrum and it was on average six decibels, but very measurable and noticeable. Put a percentage on, is that a 10% reduction in noise, 20%? Is there a way to measure that? I'm not sure I could accurately put a percentage on that, but I can tell you that the person doing the acoustic recordings after September 11th could hear the right whale sounds incredibly clear, whereas before there was this smog of noise behind that was masking the sound. The recordings were much

clearer, so it was extremely significant. And how did you figure out the whales were less stressed after September 11th? So we were taking samples and measuring stress hormones, just like our stress hormones, cortisol that are in our blood in the whales before September 11th. And we've been doing that for a decade or more. And then we compared that to the stress hormone levels after September 11th, saw this extreme drop in stress hormone levels after September 11th in 2001. And we then compared those same time periods for the four following years, and there was no difference before and after September 11th. So we knew that it was related to the drop in ship traffic and the drop in underwater noise. And what kind of reduction in stress levels did you see in those whales?

Oh, I mean, dramatically, statistically, very significant drop. Yeah. I would think that getting a, getting, wrangling a whale so you could get a sample of their hormones would be very difficult. So how do you, how do you do it? It takes a lot of persistence, a lot of time on the water. And we have used dogs on the water to locate whales and to find samples from them and measure hormones in them. And we've been doing this now for about two decades. So we've gotten very good at it. So I read in the study, one of the ways you read the hormone levels is by actually collecting the scat of whales. That's correct.

Yes, we collect whale scat. It's one of the substances that you can measure hormones in that reflect circulating hormone levels, and that's where the dogs came in. And that's, so they help you. The dogs help us find those samples. Are you scraping the bottom of the ocean floor to get it? No. In fact, it floats on the surface, and it has a particular smell that we get very used to. And the dogs are very good at finding it because of that smell. Now, some people might go, ooh, scat, that means poop. How do you react to this?

I think that it's digested copepods and it's a treasure trove of information on these whales. We've now got a panel of six hormones we can measure in scat samples in right whales. It tells us all about their health and physiology. So it's a goldmine when you want to learn about a whale. If seismic testing starts happening in their calving grounds, what is that going to do to the population? Well, it's one more cut against them and they're already struggling. So what the decrease in population growth and calving in this population and the poor health over time has told us that these whales are struggling to survive in the ocean because of all of our activities there. Seismic is adding

one very big stressful impact on top of everything else. And this population's at the tipping point, so it really could tip them over the edge. To the point where they disappear altogether? It's possible. I can tell you the scientists studying right wells, it's only been within the last year or two that I've heard all of us using the term extinction. We really didn't think that the population was headed that way, but we're very concerned that yet more impacts could push the population to extinction. The government concedes there could be impacts, but not enough to kill or seriously injure marine life. Assurance is echoed by the oil industry. Eric Melito is with the American Petroleum Institute. How accurate are these surveys? Well, the surveys are used to really give us a good image of the geology. So we will see the layers of rock below the seafloor and get a better understanding of what types of rock,

what types of sedimentary deposits, whether there are zones of salt. And what it allows us to do is pinpoint the areas that might be most prospective for oil and natural gas, but it won't exactly tell us whether or not that type of energy deposit is actually there. It gives us a good image, a good map, but we still would have to go out and do exploratory drilling work to determine if oil and gas is actually there. Tiana, which is a group that opposes the seismic testing, estimates that the blast will occur every 10 seconds, 24 hours a day, for days and weeks at a time. Is that accurate? Yes. You're going to have these vessels out there for a period of days or weeks, depending on how much can be completed based on weather conditions

and whatever is happening from the standpoint of being able to carry it out given meteorological and mid-ocean conditions. But it is periodic, but it's transitory and temporary in terms of covering the area that you're surveying. But once you're done, you're done and the companies go back and the government gets the data and then you're able to determine what the geology looks like. At its core, this is scientific geologic research. But it's scientific geologic research that marine biologists say has the potential to harm marine life, including endangered right whales that feed and breed along the Atlantic coast.

Do you agree that this testing poses a danger to them? Well, the government itself has determined that the risks are negligible and that there would not be adverse consequences to marine mammal populations. That's because the government itself has put forward requirements and mitigation measures so that we are protecting marine mammals and ensuring that we're not having an adverse impact on them. Well, from my understanding about what the government has required, it does not allow you to kill these animals, but it says nothing about injuring them. Am I wrong about that? That would be an incorrect way of describing the process and what the approvals have put forth.

The government's chief environmental officer has come out very conclusively and stated that in the course of the industry going out and conducting these surveys over the past 30 years, there's been no documented scientific evidence of these types of surveys adversely impacting marine mammals. So this has been used for decades, and we haven't seen any cases of adverse impacts to marine mammals. I went up and spoke to a marine biologist at the New England Aquarium, and she'd done a study that happened post-9-11 where they found that when the noise in the ocean, if you were, and that's just from shipping, decreases, that the stress on whales in particular drops dramatically. They say that when this testing occurs, it will be like creating Times Square in the ocean for these animals, and it will interfere with their ability to communicate, to feed and produce. How do you respond to that?

Well, the government itself has conducted decades of research as well. More than $50 million over the past 20 years has gone into studying this. Our industry takes this very seriously. We've been coexisting with marine ecosystems for years, and we just haven't seen adverse impacts. The data shows that based on the mitigation measures we have in place, we're going to be able to move forward and do this without adverse impact to the hearing aspects of the mammals. This is also research that is conducted by oceanography institutes, by academia, by universities, and they use it to get a very good understanding of what the earth's crust looks like, what the potential is for earthquakes. You mentioned mitigation practices that the industry will employ when it does this testing.

What is the industry going to do to make sure that the hearing and communication of the marine life, whales, dolphins, and other fish are not disrupted by this seismic testing? Well, first of all, you're required to slowly ramp up the sound so it's a soft start to really alert the mammals in the area so that they can make changes and move away. Second, you're required to have observers on board so that if you see a mammal, you have to shut down activity for 30 minutes before you can restart. Third, there are exclusion zones where you're not even allowed to go and conduct the surveys for the breeding periods and areas for the right whale and for other turtles and mammals. And then there are also passive acoustic monitoring requirements whereby you have to have monitors on the vessel in the water also hearing to see if there are marine mammals in the area, which if you did, you would

have to shut down. So these are the most restrictive requirements in terms of the options that were before the government, and they chose to put these forward to make sure that we're all comfortable with the activity that's occurring. And yet, even with those requirements, many local business communities and governments are against this, and particularly the fishing industry, the tourism industry, and they're going to court to try and stop it. If this is something where both your industry and those along the coast have existed in harmony for a while, it doesn't seem that way because the opposition to this is quite strong. This type of scientific research is really important for

all Americans. And that's because we have to really understand what our energy potential is so that we can look to find the resources that our economy is going to be relying upon for decades to come. For more perspective on how sound travels underwater, I spoke with Dr. Scott Krause, the Aquarium's Senior Science Advisor. How far does sound travel under the sea? It depends on the frequency. So high frequencies, like high pitches, don't travel very far. Low pitches, down at the bottom end of our hearing, can travel hundreds of miles.

And so what role does sound then play in the lives of whales and dolphins? Well, it's critical to whales and dolphins for two things. One is food finding, but maybe the more important one is the social interactions. If you can only find a mate or if you can only find your kid by making noise, then you need to be able to have an environment in which the sound travels to the other animal that you're trying to reach. So one of the things we worry about in noisy environments is what we call masking. And masking is like you go into a bar, you get there early, it's pretty quiet, you can talk to one another without any particular raising of voice. But as the people pile in, you get a lot of people in there, all of a sudden it's really noisy and you're screaming at the person next to you. And that is the context within which it's good to think about ocean noise. Because if you're an animal out there in an early or a primal ocean, it's pretty quiet.

And then you introduce shipping noise, and you introduce pile driving, and you introduce seismic exploration, and you introduce sonars. And I don't know, you can think of a variety of things. All of a sudden, the noise in the ocean rises and rises and rises. And pretty soon, it's hard to hear one another if you're an animal that depends upon listening to your neighbors to figure out what's going on. But seismic testing is just a finite thing. They go and they do it for a period of time and then they leave. So is it just a disturbance for that period of time?

Well, here's the thing about seismic testing. It's so loud that it can be heard a thousand miles away. And so it actually influences a huge section of ocean. And in the case of the seismic proposal for the east coast of the United States, we're looking at five vessels operating nearly simultaneously for a whole year. And those seismic signals are every 10 to 16 seconds. And so it's not exactly a short duration event. It lasts for a while and it's very loud, influences a huge variety of habitat.

And because the sound actually goes through the ocean, it reflects off a variety of things. It gets smeared over time and distance so that by the time it gets 100 miles away, it's kind of a big mushy sound that can actually raise these ambient noise levels and contribute to masking. How loud is it? Well, imagine you're at the end of LaGuardia's runway and you're sitting on the runway and a jet flies overhead every 10 to 16 seconds at 100 feet. That's the kind of sound we're talking about, extremely loud. And so what does that do to marine life?

There is a lot of information that suggests that it's quite damaging at close range to fish, plankton, everything on the food chain from the bottom up. It kills plankton up to a mile away or up to a kilometer and a half away, and it kills or disturbs, it changes the characteristics of fish reproduction, and in fact, it can reduce fish run away from it. So it reduces, if it happens in an area where you have an active fishing fleet, it actually reduces catches. That's a big concern to the Atlantic states. They fear testing could lead to exploratory drilling and another deep water horizon disaster,

threatening the tourist and fishing industries worth billions. Frank Knapp Jr. represents the South Carolina Small Business Chamber of Commerce. So seismic testing is the first step to allow offshore drilling for oil. So both offshore drilling for oil is very much a detriment to our tourism, recreation and commercial fishing economy, as well as simply the exploration itself will hurt our commercial fishing and recreation economy. We want neither of them. Neither of them are going to be good for local economies up and down the coast, including South Carolina. We have very strong bipartisan opposition to offshore drilling.

We have every governor along the Atlantic coast opposes it. Most attorney generals, certainly the business community is opposed to it. Citizens are opposed to it. And all local communities have passed ordinances opposing offshore drilling and seismic testing. It is a very, very strong opposition, inclusive of many members of Congress on both sides of the aisle. Let's start with the seismic testing. That in and of itself is damaging to our local economy. Commercial fishing will be very much harm. Past experience has shown

that commercial fishing catches are reduced up to 70 percent. That's going to be devastating for our whole commercial fishing industries that help our local economies. Our economies, our tourism that is based on healthy oceans, that will be harmed also when the fish and the marine mammals depart and they're not where they're supposed to be. From offshore drilling is concerned, we know that when you drill, you spill. And we know what happened with the Deepwater Horizon back in 2010, which was a test well that goes in conjunction with the exploration process. We do not need any oil reaching any of the beaches up and down our coast. We're a heavily tourism dependent economy and offshore drilling and seismic testing are simply incompatible with our economy on the Atlantic coast. It is the loudest economically and environmentally destructive noise that humans will never hear.

Bipartisan opposition turning to the courts, hoping they'll listen. For more on seismic testing, you can go to our website, NBCNews.com. This episode was produced by MBTool and edited by Patrick Martin and Jody Hennenfeld. Additional mixing by MBTool. The underwater sounds were provided by Dr. Christopher Clark. Music by The Cosmic Piano. I'm Anne Thompson, and you've been listening to NBC on Earth. Thank you. Thank you.