War of the Whales (63 page)

10. In 1976 the Department of Energy became the first nonmilitary client of the Jasons’ when it asked them to assess the connection between carbon dioxide emissions and climate change. Munk collaborated on the study with his mentor, Roger Revelle, who had been investigating climate change for two decades and would go on to be viewed as the founding father of global warming. While teaching at Harvard, Revelle ignited the passions of one student, Al Gore, who would become a tireless public educator about climate change. For his part, Munk had studied and published on the relationship between glacial melting and rising sea levels during his Navy Arctic tours. The year after completing their summer study, Munk and Revelle published one of the first papers on global warming, “Energy and Climate,” which forecast future carbon dioxide loads in Africa and around the world. Both Munk and Revelle were convinced of carbon dioxide’s causal relationship to climate change.

11. Ann Gibbons, “What’s the Sound of One Ocean Warming?”
Science
248, no. 4951 (April 6, 1990): 33–34.

12. Mel Briscoe, the Heard Island project manager at ONR, knew he’ d been caught flat-footed when John Twiss called up at the last minute to ask about the Navy’s NMFS permit. As soon as the
Cory Chouest
sailed for Freemantle, Briscoe went to work to shore up ONR’s marine biology and acoustic assets. Not to be outdone in the acronym department, Briscoe launched ORCA—Observed Response of Cetaceans to Acoustics—to study the effects of low-frequency sound on marine mammals. He brought in Dan Costa, a pinniped specialist from UC Santa Cruz who had recently worked with the Navy in Hawaii, to head up ORCA. (From author interview.)

13. The head of NOAA, physical oceanographer John Knauss, had kicked in $200,000 in funding for the Heard Island experiment from a discretionary fund he controlled. Forty years earlier, when Knauss was a graduate student at Scripps, Munk had been one of his thesis advisors.

When Knauss realized that Munk had a “whale problem,” he sent the Heard Island protocol down the hall to NOAA’s chief science officer, Sylvia Earle, for informal review and comment. She circulated the protocol to Bill Watkins and Peter Tyack up in Woods Hole. Watkins shared it with Darlene Ketten, who was already making a name for herself in whale hearing. All four of them shared the same concerns about the potential problems for animals from injecting high-intensity, low-frequency sound into the ocean.

Watkins, who had circled the globe recording “biological” sounds for the Navy, was familiar with the various species of whales that wintered in the waters of the South Indian Ocean near Heard Island. He knew from direct contact with them that many of these whale species were acoustically sensitive, including humpbacks, sperm whales, blue whales, fin whales, and beaked whales. He and Tyack wrote to NOAA and NMFS: “As planned, the Heard Island experiment is likely to disrupt feeding behavior and to mask communication over an area of many thousands of square kilometers of prime whale feeding and social habitat, during the peak season.” Watkins knew Walter Munk personally from multiple crossed paths at Woods Hole and elsewhere over the years. He also wrote to Munk to urge him to reschedule the experiment to a time of year when fewer whales were present.

NMFS concluded that ONR needed to apply for an “incidental take” permit to authorize the inevitable “harassment” of local marine mammals. When Munk heard that NMFS normally required a year or more to process such a permit, he turned to his longtime mentor, Roger Revelle, for help.

By 1990, Revelle’s health had deteriorated badly in the aftermath of two major heart attacks, and he could walk only with the help of two canes. But the day Munk was due to meet with Knauss at NOAA to discuss the disposition of the Heard Island experiment, Revelle flew in from San Diego to attend. In the course of the meeting, Knauss came up with a plan for an NMFS research permit that would take only a few weeks to process, as opposed to an incidental take permit. If Munk could build a biological component into his project, he could apply for a permit to conduct research that would benefit marine mammals, even if it harassed them. The frequency of the acoustic “shots” was decreased, and a crew of biologists would observe the behavior of marine mammals from a second ship.

14. Munk raised the $35 million he needed to install and activate Acoustic Thermometry from an alphabet soup of quasimilitary agencies such as DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) and SERDP (Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program). Acoustic Thermometry would remain under ONR’s direction, and the Navy would maintain proprietary control over the classified data from its sound transmissions. But Scripps would be the applicant for the Fisheries permit, and Munk and his Scripps-based team would direct the acoustic component.

15. In the mid-1980s, Chris Clark had conducted an acoustic census of the spring migration of bowhead whales past Point Barrow, Alaska, in order to assess whether the bowhead population could sustain a Native American hunt. Using underwater hydrophones, he’ d solved the mystery of how bowheads breathed during their long migration beneath the Arctic ice pack. Clark and his team observed that the bowheads used their calls to sound out the thinnest sections of ice and then broke breathing holes in the ice using their distinctive bowheaded rostrums.

Unbeknown to Clark’s colleagues, ONR had previously recruited him to assess “biological response” to its classified Low Frequency Active sonar tests off the California coast. Working aboard the
Cory Chouest
, Clark had surveyed the surrounding waters to see if there were whales in the vicinity and, if so, to monitor their response to the sonar.

Pittenger offered Clark an additional inducement to take the scientific lead on Acoustic Thermometry. Now that the Cold War was over and the SOSUS system was finally declassified, Pittenger worried that it might be sacrificed to peacetime budget cutting. To further enhance SOSUS’ dual-use, ONR launched Whales ’93.

After decades of exerting tight control over SOSUS, the heads of naval intelligence were reluctant to open it up to civilian researchers. Bill Watkins, whose security clearance and access to SOSUS stations for his bioacoustic research went back decades, was an easy sell. Pittenger guessed that since Clark had security clearance already from his sonar work aboard the
Cory Chouest
, he could be slotted into Whales ’93 alongside Watkins.

For Clark, the SOSUS listening system was an “acoustic telescope” that pierced the dark ocean depths; a crystal-clear window into a soundscape that only cetaceans and SOSUS operators had ever explored. With advanced signal processing across ten acoustic channels, he could focus multiple hydrophones, set a mile apart with 500 sensors between them, at a single phonating whale. Over one 43-day period, Clark traced the journey of a blue whale swimming up and down the Eastern Seaboard as easily as a radar dish could track a plane’s flight across the sky. Most exciting of all was being able to eavesdrop on blue whales as they called to one another through the deep sound channel across 1,000 miles of open ocean.

16. Richard Paddock, “Undersea Noise Test Could Risk Making Whales Deaf,”
Los Angeles Times
, March 22, 1994, Home edition, sec. Main News: A-1.

17. Sylvia Earle was a high-profile oceanographer, the only prominent woman in her field, and a generation behind Munk. While still an undergraduate at Florida State University, she assisted Winthrop Kellogg in his pioneering dolphin echolocation experiments. After forcing her way onto all-male oceanography expeditions in the 1960s, Earle collaborated with Roger and Katy Payne and Peter Tyack on humpback whales research in Hawaii. In 1970, when ONR and NASA sponsored a Sealab spinoff called Tektite 2 and refused to let women divers join male aquanauts in the deep-submersion research station, Earle insisted that they field an all-female expedition. After leading the first female team to work at the bottom of the ocean and writing about it for
National Geographic
magazine, Earle became a bona fide oceanography celebrity on par with Jacques Cousteau. In 1979 she made a record dive to 1,250 feet in a specially designed diving suit. And in the mid-1980s, she founded Deep Ocean Engineering to manufacture the Deep Rover research vessels.

Chapter 15: The Sonar That Came In from the Cold

1. The Navy’s three-part scientific research program for LFA sonar:

Phase I would transmit low-frequency sonar from the
Cory Chouest
, positioned west of the Channel Islands, to measure its effect on blue and fin whale vocalizations.

Phase II would broadcast from a sound source anchored on a sea mount off the coast of California, directly in the migration path of Pacific gray whales.

Phase III would study the effect of low-frequency sound on the songs of humpback whales off the Kona coast of Hawaii.

2. Late one night, when he was wrestling with how to respond to Gisiner’s offer, Tyack called his old friend Hal Whitehead for guidance—or perhaps, his blessing. Whitehead was sympathetic to Tyack’s dilemma. Unlike Canada, where Whitehead taught, US researchers had few funding sources other than the Navy. “Soft money” researchers like Clark and Tyack had to spend half their time raising money. With a budget of $16 million, the LFA research program was the best-funded bioacoustic project the Navy, or anyone else, had ever sponsored.

3. Administrative record cited in NRDC’s summary judgment brief in 2003 LFA lawsuit
NRDC v. Evans
.

4. Shortly after the anti-LFA demonstrations in Hawaii, Exxon applied to Fisheries for a permit to conduct seismic surveys off the coast of Southern California in the migratory path of gray whales. When Reynolds threatened to sue, Exxon said it wanted to sit down and talk—perhaps mindful of the possibility of Ben White and his cohort descending on the scene in a flotilla of small boats with bullhorns. Reynolds negotiated a 30-point agreement that included mitigation measures to limit the time and location of the survey to avoid migrating whales.

Reynolds knew that a single settlement wasn’t going to change the way big oil did business. But it convinced him that so long as he had the law on his side, it was usually more productive to negotiate incremental improvements than to litigate against giant energy companies with entire law firms on retainer and pockets deep enough to stay in court for decades.

5. Michael Jasny et al.,
Sounding the Depths II: The Rising Toll of Sonar, Shipping and Industrial Ocean Noise on Marine Life
(New York: Natural Resources Defense Council, November 2005), www.nrdc.org/wildlife/marine/sound/sound.pdf.

Chapter 17: A Mind in the Water

1. Whaling in the 1930s was rapacious, particularly by factory ships in the Antarctic. Tens of thousands of large baleen whales—blue, sei, fin, and humpbacks—as well as sperm whales, were killed each year from 1930 to 1940, and whaling continued to take a lethal toll on many species well into the 1960s. For a statistical overview of twentieth-century whaling by species and region, see: http://luna.pos.to/whale and D. G. Chapman’s “The Plight of the Whales,” www.cengage.com/resource_uploads/downloads/0534094929_46524.pdf.

2. Like whales, bats had long defied the efforts of scientific classifiers to perceive their true natures. In the fourth century BC, Aristotle made the first systematic effort to classify animals into three groups according to their method of locomotion: creeping, flying, and swimming. In this system, whales were grouped with fish, and bats were grouped with birds. Two thousand years later, Carolus Linnaeus classified the two kingdoms of plants and animals into groups according to their form. In the tenth edition of his
Systema Naturae
, published in 1758, Linnaeus finally moved whales and bats out of their respective fish and bird categories and into the mammalian class, alongside
Homo sapiens
and other primates who, true to “form,” have mammary glands with which to suckle their young.

3. During World War II, the US military hatched a novel plan for deploying bats in combat. Working inside Harvard’s psychoacoustics lab, Griffin was assigned to the Bat Bomb Project, the brainchild of a dental surgeon and bat enthusiast named Lytle Adams. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Adams sold the War Department on his idea of surgically implanting incendiary devices into the chests of thousands of bats, and then releasing them from planes over Japanese cities. Adams theorized that the bats would nest under the eaves of the wooden houses that dominated Japanese cities. When their time-delayed fuses expired, the bats—and the buildings—would explode into flames. The War Department built a mock Japanese village in the desert outside Carlsbad, New Mexico, to war-game the bat bomb. Once unleashed, the planeload of incendiary bats burned the wooden village to the ground, but a few errant bats managed to also incinerate a nearby military research facility. The War Department decided to abandon bat bombs in favor of the conventional incendiary bombs it dropped from B-29s over Tokyo and dozens of other Japanese cities in 1945.

Meanwhile, on the European front, the Navy was trying to enlist pigeons into its bombing campaigns. Another Harvard-educated researcher, behaviorist B. F. Skinner, conceived Project Pigeon to improve the guidance system of missiles targeting German battleships. Skinner placed operant-conditioned pigeons inside the nose cone and trained them to steer the missile to its target by pecking on a projected image of the battleship. Despite an effective demonstration, Skinner couldn’t convince the Navy brass to trust pigeons to guide their missiles, and Project Pigeon was aborted in 1944.

4. For an insightful and heroically researched investigation of John Lilly’s influence on the New Age and Save the Whale movements, see D. Graham Burnette’s
The Sounding of the Whale: Science and Cetaceans in the Twentieth Century
(University of Chicago Press, 2012).

5. According to his own account, Lilly had brought along an enormous cache of anesthetic, enough “to anesthetize everyone at Marineland and still have some left,” he would later write. He’ d also fashioned a respirator to help the dolphins breathe under anesthesia. After removing a dolphin from the water and placing it on a stretcher, he injected it with 80 cubic centimeters of the barbiturate Nembutal. Over the next half hour, the investigators stood by and watched helplessly as the dolphin’s respiration deteriorated. Unfamiliar with the anatomy of the dolphin’s larynx and windpipe, Lilly couldn’t figure out how to attach his respirator. Eventually the dolphin went into cardiac arrest and died.