War of the Whales (28 page)

When he noticed Pittenger in the doorway, Munk scrambled the sugar packets and waved him over. The two exchanged Navy gossip and family news until their gin and tonics arrived. Then they clinked glasses, and Munk began his pitch.

“As you well know, Dick, I’ve been searching for a way to test acoustic tomography and climate change on a global scale.” Munk spoke in a conspiratorial stage whisper, his Viennese accent still strong after five decades in America. “I wanted you to be the first to hear what I’ve come up with.”

It was deliciously simple, Munk explained. Since the speed of sound in water increases with temperature, the simplest way to measure global warming was to time the speed of a constant sound signal across the ocean, over a period of years. If the sound signal sped up over time, it would prove that the oceans were warming, and how quickly. Munk hypothesized that for every 1-degree-Celsius increase in ocean temperature, the speed of sound would increase by four meters per second.

Munk looked at Pittenger to see if he understood. The admiral nodded and smiled. “So,” Munk continued, “here’s the part you’ll particularly appreciate, my friend.”

In Pittenger’s experience, Munk never needed any presentation props beyond a cocktail napkin and a ballpoint pen. Sure enough, the oceanographer now unfolded a CC-monogrammed bar napkin and quickly sketched out a map of the continents, with the southern Indian Ocean at its center. “This is Heard Island,” he said, making a dot halfway between South Africa and Western Australia and marking it “H.I.” “It’s an uninhabited, glaciated volcano at fifty-four degrees south, seventy-four degrees east.” He looked up at Pittenger for a reaction. “Can you guess why I’ve chosen this location for the sound source?”

This is the Wall.

By way of illustrating the answer, Munk began to draw ray-paths from the island to Antarctica and the tips of South Africa, India, South America, Australia, New Zealand, and Brazil.

“Heard Island looks to be about equidistant from the East and West Coasts of the US,” Pittenger observed.

“Precisely equidistant!” exclaimed Munk, filling in ancillary ray tracings in every direction. “In fact, Heard Island is the only location on earth from which geodesic ray-paths can cross every ocean and reach every continent.” He paused for a moment to admire the elegance of his experiment’s design. Even in his seventies, Munk’s face flushed with excitement. “If we can broadcast a powerful-enough sound signal from Heard Island to reach these sixteen receivers around the globe”—he quickly made a series of
X
s to signify SOSUS receivers on various continents—“we’ll be able to read temperature and internal wave gradients across all the oceans
simultaneously
!”

Pittenger asked him how powerful a sound source he’ d need. When Munk responded that he’ d require 2,500 watts of power transmitting at 220 decibels at low frequency, Pittenger saw where Munk was heading with his proposal. There was only one sea-based sound transducer that could transmit underwater at 2,500 watts: the
Cory Chouest
.

Though it had never appeared in any published directory of Navy ships, the
Cory Chouest
was the workhorse of the Navy’s Low Frequency Active sonar program. Originally an oil field support tug, the
Cory Chouest
had been retrofitted to ONR’s specs with a powerful sound transducer lowered through the center of its hull, enabling it to transmit high-intensity, low-frequency sound pulses in all directions. For the past several years, ONR personnel aboard the
Cory Chouest
had been conducting secret sea tests of Low Frequency Active sonar around the world. Since the
Cory Chouest
had been under his direction at the Pentagon, Pittenger knew that it was currently positioned in the Indian Ocean, not far from Heard Island.

Pittenger found a lot to like in Munk’s proposal. On Capitol Hill, the politicians had quickly moved from declaring victory in the Cold War to carving up the Navy’s budget. Loaning out the
Cory Chouest
and the network of SOSUS sound receivers to Munk would constitute a perfect “swords into ploughshares” showcase for the bean counters on Capitol Hill, while providing a rationale for continued funding of the Navy’s hard-earned Cold War assets.

As Oceanographer of the Navy, Pittenger had a keen interest in climate change—because of the dramatic impact it would have on antisubmarine warfare tactics. Whatever changed the ocean climate would change sound in the ocean, and sonar. Ever since the first compelling evidence of global warming emerged in the late 1970s and 1980s—including from Munk’s first study of the effect of carbon dioxide on climate—Pittenger had been particularly focused on the accelerated melting of the Arctic ice cap, since the Artic had always been a strategic submarine battlespace. In 1984, he’ d commissioned the Navy’s first surface ship expedition to study the problem in the Arctic. And soon after becoming Oceanographer of the Navy—whose duties included working in close liaison with NOAA on climate issues—Pittenger sponsored the purchase of the operational Navy’s first Cray supercomputer, for use in acoustic modeling of climate change in the ocean.

Munk was already looking beyond Heard Island to the establishment of an ongoing “acoustic observatory” in the ocean, analogous to an astronomical observatory. Acoustic tomography would enable oceanographers to address fundamental questions about the oceans, in the same way that astronomers had for centuries probed the mysteries of the heavens. Monitoring climate change was just the beginning.

Pittenger had his own vision—of a future when the Navy would have continual access to a real-time sonogram of the oceans. On paper at least—or rather, as illustrated on a Cosmos Club cocktail napkin—acoustic tomography promised to finally deliver the holy grail of antisubmarine warfare: a three-dimensional map of the seven seas that could track submarine movements at any distance and at any depth.

In deference to the Cosmos Club’s prohibition on conducting business in the public rooms, Pittenger and Munk retired upstairs to an empty card room. Within an hour, they had worked up a budget for the Heard Island Feasibility Test.

The Heard Island expedition was on course to become the crowning achievement of Munk’s career. It combined all the elements he loved most: a big idea for solving a significant problem, lots of boats and scientists around the world working with state-of-the-art hardware and software, and enough uncertainty to ensure suspense about the outcome. But now, with commencement of the experiment less than three weeks off, Munk was marooned at port on the west coast of Australia, waiting for permission from US Fisheries to proceed. Dozens of researchers were already on-site at Heard Island and positioned at listening stations around the world. With so many moving parts, delaying the experiment’s start date would be tantamount to cancellation.

Everything had proceeded apace since the Cosmos Club meeting. With Pittenger running interference, it had taken Munk only a few months to raise the $1.7 million in funding from ONR, the National Science Foundation, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the Department of Energy. Though there were four agency sponsors, the Heard Island experiment was being run out of ONR, if only because it owned the
Cory Chouest
. Global warming was such a timely topic that ONR’s role as lead funder and project director escaped notice. And for the first time in his long career, Munk could speak publicly about one of his experiments to scientific colleagues and to journalists. He coined the double-meaning moniker “The Shot Heard Round the World” to describe his Heard Island experiment. No one below Pittenger’s pay grade—certainly not the science writers who delighted in profiling the Viennese “Einstein of the Oceans”—grasped the military significance of acoustic tomography.

It was all smooth sailing until
Science
magazine ran an article entitled, “What’s the Sound of One Ocean Warming?”
¹¹
It caught the attention of John Twiss, the executive director of the Marine Mammal Commission, an independent federal agency created by Congress to watchdog the provisions of the 1972 Marine Mammal Protection Act. As he read the details of Munk’s sound experiment, Twiss grew alarmed:
220-decibel sound pulses transmitting one hour on and one off for ten days at low frequency
! What little research had been conducted on the effects of low-frequency sound showed that marine mammals changed their behavior in response to just 120 decibels. It seemed obvious to Twiss that a global sound experiment of such intensity would likely pose a danger to marine mammals.

Twiss called the project director at ONR,
¹²
who’ d spent most of his career running acoustic projects for the Navy. He had never heard of Twiss, or the Marine Mammal Commission.

“So tell me,” asked Twiss after he’ d introduced himself and his agency, “has Fisheries granted you permits for Heard Island yet?”

“Permits?” asked the project director. “What permits?”

That laconic exchange marked the end of the era of unimpeded Navy sound experiments in the oceans. The Marine Mammal Protection Act had been on the books for almost 20 years, but the Navy had never applied for a permit—as the law mandated—for any experiment or exercise that might “injure or harass” any marine mammals. Congress didn’t invest the Marine Mammal Commission with enforcement powers, but the commission’s advisory role to Congress gave Twiss a powerful bully pulpit.

Twiss telephoned the head of NOAA, the parent agency of Fisheries, and pointed out that the area immediately surrounding Heard Island was rich with marine life, including several species of endangered whales. Certainly this experiment merited a thorough scientific review and judicious permitting process.

Fortunately for Munk, NOAA was one of the Heard Island experiment’s lead sponsors, and the agency’s director had once been a PhD student of Munk’s at Scripps.
¹³
A Fisheries permit would ordinarily take months to prepare and approve, but he was able to secure a special “research permit” in a week’s time, just days before the feasibility test’s scheduled start date.

The first sound transmission was to commence on January 26, 1991. Munk calculated that the signal would take three and a half hours to travel west to Bermuda and slightly longer to arrive on the Oregon coast, 10,000 miles east of Heard Island. On the night of January 25, Munk wanted to retire early. He was exhausted by the last-minute permit drama and the checking and rechecking of all the instruments aboard the
Cory Chouest
. When the sound engineer insisted that he needed to do one more sound test, Munk waved good night and went belowdecks to sleep.

In the middle of the night, Munk was awakened by the radiophone beside his bed. It was his man in Bermuda, and he sounded irritated. “What’s going on out there? We’re already receiving a signal!”

It took a moment to sink in. “Oh my God, it works!” Munk shouted. The sound engineer aboard the
Cory Chouest
had jumped the gun by 12 hours, but the test signal had traveled past South Africa and Brazil, all the way to Bermuda! Munk wanted to be alert for the next day, so he went back to sleep. Fifteen minutes later, he was awakened by a call from his station operator on the Oregon coast, where the signal had just arrived across the Pacific, loud and clear. The feasibility of global-scale sound transmission had been confirmed before the experiment had formally begun.

The next day, the transmissions commenced on schedule, and the other stations reported in. The
Cory Chouest
’s low-frequency sound signals were received across five ocean basins by 16 different listening stations. Two weeks later, Munk set sail for La Jolla, California, elated by the success of his mission and excited to launch the implementation phase of his project.

•  •  •

By the summer of 1992, the Cold War was quickly receding into America’s rearview mirror, overtaken by the first Gulf War and a deepening economic recession.

No one ever accused Walter Munk of being a slow learner when it came to fund-raising for his grandiose oceanography experiments. He understood that the rules of the game had changed. “Swords into ploughshares” and “dual-use technology” were the new watchwords of defense appropriations. Fortunately, acoustic tomography fit neatly under the military-civilian “dual-use” rubric being advanced by vice presidential candidate Senator Al Gore. In hopes of endearing his project to the new funding oligarchy, Munk rechristened the implementation phase of acoustic tomography with a more environmentally correct name: Acoustic
Thermometry
.

With his Navy sponsors under pressure to cut their budgets, Munk had to look farther afield to finance the next phase of his project. After 18 months circling the Beltway, he raised the $35 million he needed to install and activate a two-year broadcast of low-frequency, high-decibel sound from transmitters off Point Sur, California, and Kauai, Hawaii.
¹⁴