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 North Atlantic right whales, of which only 500 remain.
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“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 as loud as a howitzer 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 company geologists figure out whether sub-sea rock formations are likely to contain fossil fuels worth drilling.
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 such extreme pulses of sound can do to the hearing and communication of whales and other marine life that use sound to locate food and mates, and to keep track of young.
“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.
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