Doing their part to celebrate Earth Day, Conn’s Oceana club performed a mock oil spill in front of Shain Library last Monday. The event – which coincided with the College’s Spring Open House for admitted students– featured two people in hazmat suits furiously scrubbing at a spray-painted oil spill atop an ocean of blue tarp. Students and visitors alike stopped to watch curiously as the two students attempted to clean the “oil” off of the “water,” as well as rescuing the occasional stuffed dolphin or whale. The tarp was surrounded by bright yellow caution tape. Nearby, the leaders of the club were stationed at a table, passing out pamphlets and stickers.
The goal of the gathering was to raise campus awareness of the dangers of offshore oil drilling, specifically the use of seismic air guns to test for oil and gas deposits below the ocean floor. Seismic airgun testing is conducted by vessels that tow large air guns through the ocean, which repeatedly shoot compressed air through the water for miles under the sea floor. Audio monitors attached to the guns measure the blasts to detect areas with natural gas and oil deposits. The blasts occur every ten seconds, twenty-four hours a day. It is unknown how long seismic air gun testing will take place for.
While this method of locating sites that are rich in natural resources appears to be efficient, it is also extremely harmful to marine life. Seismic airgun testing is incredibly loud; the sound is 100,000 times more intense than that of a jet engine. The noise of the compressed air being shot through the ocean can permanently deafen a range of underwater species. This danger disrupts mating and feeding practices and can even drive wildlife to abandon their habitats. In some cases, disoriented animals wind up beached and many do not survive without their hearing. According to the Oceana organization, 138,500 dolphins and whales will be severely injured if the seismic airgun testing is implemented in the Atlantic Ocean. Such marine mammals are especially vulnerable to such injury, as they rely on hearing to find food, reproduce and communicate with one another.
The negative effects of seismic airgun testing expand beyond the disruption of wildlife. Such testing will be harmful to commercial fishermen, disrupting coastal economies. Furthermore, the testing is the first step towards the more dangerous offshore oil drilling initiative, which can have even more destructive effects on the environment.
At the mock oil spill, Oceana participants urged onlookers to sign a petition asking President Obama to prevent the use of seismic airguns. According to Oceana, 100,000 signatures are needed by May 15 in order to generate an official response from the Obama Administration. The petition is also available online at Oceana’s website.
Though the demonstration outside of the library was primarily dedicated to educating students on the dangers of using seismic airguns, the organization also worked to promote a viable solution for such a problem. The club distributed pamphlets on Offshore Wind, a possible solution for cleaner energy and cleaner oceans that would also alleviate America’s dependence on oil as an energy source. According to Oceana, offshore wind turbines could potentially offer the energy of 2,000 coal-fired power plants. Additionally, the manufacturing and maintenance of the turbines would create thousands of jobs. This renewable resource would not only provide long-term stability in electricity costs, but could also help to support the U.S. economy. Today, China is leading in offshore wind energy development and is already reaping the benefits turbine installations. According to Oceana, the U.S. is “playing catch up.”
The Oceana club on campus has been promoting the prevention of seismic airgun testing and similar environmental initiatives throughout the year. “Oceana is the first collegiate chapter in the broader international Oceana organization,” said Co-President Caroline Collins ’15. By hosting demonstrations such as the Mock Oil Spill, the club hopes to place students in touch with salient national and global issues.
I am, quite frankly, horrified that Oceana can pass off this report (A deaf whale is a dead whale) as a legitimate science-based publication when it is so blatantly incorrect it deserves to be consigned to electronic shredder! I am equally perturbed that the media propagates such blatant lies, without checking the facts, to a misinformed public. The claim that seismic pulses are 100,000 times more intense than a jet engine is so far from the truth that Oceana should post an apology. Firstly, they’ve taken the sound of a jet engine at, I suspect, 30m (not 1m) to compare with the unrealistic top end of a seismic source at 1m. A more realistic level for a modern day seismic source is 240dB. Then they appear to have “forgotten” about the 61.5dB difference between the same sound intensities in air and water in their calculation – although they have shown it in the pictorial in their Executive summary. For example, 180dB in air would be approx 240dB in water. Thus, as an analogy, the sound level of a jet taking off is actually similar to the sound of a seismic source – NOT 100,000 times as Oceana (and now everyone else who has “jumped on the bandwagon” claim. Anyone who has been to an airport or an airshow will know that such a sound is NOT deafening at a few hundred metres (although it would certainly be damaging at a few metres!). This is why seismic sound levels are brought up slowly over 30 minutes – so that whales can move to a stand-off distance which is comfortable to them. This is observed to be anything between just a few hundred metres and a few 10′s of km dependant on the species and the context. They are certainly not affected at the distances Oceana claim them to be.
Surely organisations like Oceana and Greenpeace should be interested in presenting the facts to the public and not the misinformation that they do promote? However, if they presented a more factually based position perhaps the unsuspecting public would not be moved to donate!!
I must commend “The College Voice” on being a democratic, open and transparent website by posting my earlier comment regarding Oceana’s misinformation. It is a “breathe of fresh air” especially compared to the Oceana and Greenpeace websites because I posted a similar comment on the Oceana and Greenpeace websites a few days ago and they have not been uploaded. To me, this means that neither of these organisations want society to know the true facts and simply wish to continue spreading their misinformation, disinformation, exaggeration and blatant lies to an unsuspecting public. It’s about time there was an open and transparent debate on this issue. However, it appears that Oceana and Greenpeace practice CENSORSHIP in its worse form – that is, deleting any comments that contradict their ideology.
Again, I sincerely commend this website for its democratic, open and transparent position.
Commonsense tells me that a sound 100,000 times louder than a jet engine is impossible. Even the explosion of a nuclear bomb is nowhere near that intensity. Please don’t accept the emotive fabrications from environmental activist websites as facts.