War of the Whales (29 page)

To deflect the kind of blowback from the marine mammal community that almost scuttled the Heard Island Feasibility Test, Munk agreed to dial down his sound source by 30 decibels, to 195 decibels, and to commit 10 percent of his hard-won budget to marine mammal monitoring. Pittenger—who had scolded Munk for failing to anticipate the necessary permits for Heard Island—suggested that Scripps hire a well-respected marine mammal researcher to run the regulatory gauntlet for Acoustic Thermometry. Chris Clark, the director of the Bioacoustics Research Program at Cornell, was a widely recognized bioacoustician who specialized in how baleen whales such as humpbacks, bowheads, and blue whales used low-frequency sound to navigate and communicate.
¹⁵

Throughout 1993, Clark worked quietly with the Navy to keep Acoustic Thermometry’s permit application moving smoothly through the Fisheries bureaucracy and off the radar of marine mammal advocates. Then, in February 1994, just as Fisheries was preparing to issue a permit for Acoustic Thermometry, a postgraduate student in Clark’s Cornell bioacoustics lab, Lindy Weilgart, got wind of the program. Weilgart was appalled that Clark would be promoting a high-intensity sound experiment with potentially disastrous consequences for marine mammals.

Weilgart and her husband, Hal Whitehead, were active at the time in the campaign to halt the Navy ship shock test in California. Weilgart was a recent PhD with none of Whitehead’s expert credentials and reputation. But she was determined to sound the alarm—as loudly as possible—about the potential threat that Acoustic Thermometry posed to whales. She sent out a stream of faxes and posted impassioned messages on the newly launched MARMAM Listserv in hopes of rousing the conservation community into opposition. But her plea failed to instigate any public protest.

When Joel Reynolds read Weilgart’s MARMAM posting, he immediately called her for more information. Reynolds had only recently become involved in the ship shock case and was still learning his way around marine mammal law. Intrigued by the details that Weilgart was able to provide about Acoustic Thermometry, Reynolds conducted some quick research and discovered that he could submit a request to Fisheries for a public hearing on Scripps’ permit application—but the deadline was one day away. He quickly drafted the request and faxed it to Fisheries.

The agency agreed to hold a single public hearing in Silver Spring, Maryland, on March 22, just days before its scheduled decision on Acoustic Thermometry’s permit. The day of the hearing, the
Los Angeles Times
published a front-page article about the sound experiment that hit all the hot buttons for a California readership that revered its coastline and marine habitats:

“One set of loudspeakers would be located twenty-five miles offshore in the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, where rare blue whales, humpbacks, and other whale species gather.

“. . . Sponsors of the project at Scripps estimate that the noise off the California coast could affect 677,000 marine mammals.”
¹⁶

Weilgart was the sole scientist interviewed for the article, which quoted a lengthy list of ways she believed Acoustic Thermometry’s high-decibel sound signal might harm whales and render them unable to navigate or find food. But one particular pull-quote would galvanize public opposition to Acoustic Thermometry: “A deaf whale is a dead whale.”

By day’s end, both California senators, Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, had called on Fisheries “to proceed cautiously” with its permitting process. Feinstein asked the agency to consider other locations for the project, while Boxer demanded it hold public hearings in California and recommended that congressional approval be required for Acoustic Thermometry. Reynolds wrote to Fisheries, urging it to require Scripps to prepare a full Environmental Impact Statement to assess the harm its sound source could pose to marine mammals.

Besieged by phone calls and faxes from outraged Californians, Fisheries delayed its permitting decision and extended the comment period to include public hearings in Santa Cruz and Kauai. Both hearings were well attended, and both went badly for the Scripps team. Munk was shouted down as a heartless whale killer. “A deaf whale is a dead whale!” became the opposition rallying cry from California to Capitol Hill. Fisheries’ two public hearings turned into a dozen meetings up and down the California coast and in Hawaii. For Munk, who attended each meeting until the bitter end, it was a torturous series of humiliating public rebukes. Virtually his only defender was a young Darlene Ketten, who flew out west with a sperm whale ear bone on her lap as a teaching prop to explain why Acoustic Thermometry’s low-frequency sound waves would likely prove harmless to whales. But no one seemed willing to trust Ketten’s and Munk’s assurances.

In reality, no one could predict the impact of Acoustic Thermometry on whales or other marine life. No one had ever broadcast 195 decibels of low-frequency sound for years on end, generated inside a marine mammal sanctuary and audible across an entire ocean basin. With bioacoustic experts reduced to speculation on both sides of the argument, Acoustic Thermometry became a test case for the precautionary principle. Oceanographer Sylvia Earle summed up the position of the skeptics in the written statement she submitted to Fisheries: “If you further damage the patient, the earth, while you try to take its temperature, then maybe the method is flawed.”

When Fisheries decided to table its decision on a permit, Acoustic Thermometry was at an impasse. ONR brought in a new project director, Bob Gisiner, to try to revive the permitting process. But at that late date, Gisiner could do little more than watch the Scripps team move through the five stages of grief for its formerly grand, now stranded, project.

Munk was dismayed at being cast as an environmental villain after conceiving an ingenious method for measuring climate change. A man who could predict the movements of underwater weather systems across the oceans had failed to anticipate the tsunami of opposition that had overwhelmed his global sound experiment.

Meanwhile, Reynolds—who felt emboldened by his recently won injunction against the Navy’s ship shock test—pressed Scripps to move its sound experiment outside the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary. NRDC sent a direct mail letter to its members who, in turn, unleashed a torrent of letters to Scripps asking why the West Coast’s leading oceanographic institute would be endangering whales.

Munk was galled by Reynolds’ attacks, particularly since Scripps and NRDC scientists had recently collaborated on a nuclear-nonproliferation project to monitor underground explosive tests. In a fit of pique, Munk called NRDC Executive Director John Adams in New York to ask him to get Reynolds off his back. Or at least to agree not to sue Scripps. Wasn’t NRDC concerned about global warming? Munk asked.

Adams explained as diplomatically as possible that while he valued Scripps’ expertise and partnership, ocean noise was an important issue for NRDC, and it was going to see it through. “I don’t tell my senior attorneys how to do their job,” he told Munk, “and as far as I’m concerned, Joel Reynolds is just doing what I hired him to do.”

After he got off with Munk, Adams called Reynolds to tell him not to worry about Scripps or Munk. “Fuck ’em,” he said with characteristic bluntness. “Just keep doing what you’re doing. And don’t look over your shoulder.”

When Munk realized that Adams wasn’t going to rein in Reynolds, he called Sylvia Earle and asked her to broker a peace. She was the obvious person to bridge the chasm between physical oceanographers and marine biologists, having divided her career between both disciplines.
¹⁷

Earle liked Munk personally. He had an irresistible continental charm, and he was unassailably a genius when it came to decoding the internal structures of the ocean. But she resented the arrogance of Munk’s generation of physical oceanographers, who turned a blind eye to marine life. She’ d recently resigned her position as chief scientist at NOAA—a stint she referred to as her “US Sturgeon General” period—to become a more vocal activist on behalf of ocean conservation. Her book
Sea Change: A Message of the Oceans
, published that same year, was a clarion call to rescue the oceans from “death by debris” and “death by a thousand cuts,” including noise pollution.

Munk distrusted Earle’s recent tilt toward environmental advocacy. But he was out of options. Earle had collaborated with Scripps on a number of research projects over the years, and she currently sat on NRDC’s board. The day after she heard from Munk, Earle got a call from John Adams with a parallel request that she coax the two sides toward a compromise. She agreed to try.

Earle convened a meeting in San Francisco where researchers on both sides could express their views and try to find common ground. No press was allowed. Neither was the general public. The goal was to move the discussion from the vitriol of a public debate to a closed-door meeting among scientists—and their lawyers. The hoped-for result would be a process for moving forward with Acoustic Thermometry without resorting to lawsuits—though NRDC clearly stood ready to go to court if the parties failed to reach an agreement.

Earle opened the meeting by expressing her own cautionary view of deep-sea sound experiments: “Listen before you leap, because you can’t undo damage once it’s done.” Otherwise she hung back and let the invited guests do the talking. Reynolds simply took notes as the scientists articulated their views.

By the end of the session, a framework for a settlement had emerged. Munk and his team would devote phase one of Acoustic Thermometry, including a third of its funding, to studying the effects of low-frequency sound on marine mammals. Phase two would proceed only if monitoring of phase one demonstrated that the sound source posed no threat to the whales in its path. Munk would move the California sound source from the ocean floor off Point Sur in the Monterey Marine Sanctuary up the coast and farther offshore, where there were fewer marine mammals. Reynolds and the Scripps attorneys agreed to work out the details in a follow-up meeting.

Munk watched in dazed disbelief as his prized program drifted farther and farther out to sea. After years of painstaking mathematical calculations and logistical planning, after endless rounds of grant writing and fund-raising, after all the abusive public hearings where he’ d been treated like a war criminal, it had come to this: a roomful of lawyers who understood less about underwater acoustics than his first-year grad students were haggling over his Acoustic Thermometry assets like so much community property in a divorce settlement. It was simply too much to bear.

Munk shoved back his chair and glared across the table at Reynolds. When he spoke, his voice had none of its usual courtly lilt. “I really don’t understand why you’ve gone after us like this,” said Munk, clearly strained by fatigue and exasperation. “The Navy is putting so much more sound into the ocean, right here off the California coast.”

Reynolds sat stock still, waiting for Munk to continue. He’ d conducted enough depositions to know when to ask questions and when to shut up and let a witness do the talking. “Magellan II was transmitting up and down the coast just last summer.”

With as little inflection as he could, Reynolds intoned, “Magellan II . . .”

“Yes, Magellan II is much louder than our sound source,” Munk continued. “Two hundred thirty-five decibels.” He also quoted a frequency range of 250 hertz, which Reynolds scribbled on his legal pad. “Next to Magellan II,” Munk insisted, “Acoustic Thermometry sounds like a humming refrigerator.”

Reynolds scanned the room, but no one else seemed to register that Munk was detailing the acoustic specs of a code-named Navy operation—except for Sylvia Earle, who gave Reynolds a questioning glance. After the meeting adjourned and everyone else had left for the airport, Earle turned to Reynolds. “What was Munk talking about?” she asked. “Magellan II?”

Reynolds shrugged. He had no idea. But he was determined to find out.

* Though the Jasons’ summer study sessions continued without interruption throughout the Cold War and beyond, as late as their informal 50th reunion in 2010, no verifiable list of Jason members had ever been published.

15

The Sonar That Came In from the Cold

The morning after the Acoustic Thermometry settlement meeting, Reynolds was still puzzling over his handwritten notes: “Magellan II” . . . “sound source level: 235 decibels” . . . “transmission frequency: 250 hertz.”

Walter Munk had opened the vault of the Navy’s secret underwater sound experiments. But only a crack. The longer Reynolds stared at the figures on his yellow legal pad, the more mystified he became.

Everything Reynolds knew about marine mammals and underwater acoustics he’ d crammed during the prior six months of the ship shock and Acoustic Thermometry controversies. He understood the basics of how sound behaves in the ocean, and how whales and dolphins use acoustics to communicate, hunt, and navigate. But his knowledge of sonar and antisubmarine warfare began and ended with episodes of
Sea Hunt
he’ d watched on TV as a kid.