One of the most damaging events in history is about to hit the earth - that is deep sea and shallow continental shelf exploration for oil and gas, using what is called 3D Seismic Air-Gun explosions.
These explosions literally harm and damage organisms from plankton, shrimp, lobsters, other crustaceans, fish and of course marine mammals such as whales and dolphins and seals.
The industry seriously DOES NOT CARE one iota about the damage that they create or the harm that is produced by the actual search efforts.
Off Africa right now plans are being made to create surveys literally from South Africa all the way up the Atlantic (west) side to Morocco at the Straits of Gibraltar.
Plankton -
Without it two primary issues will exist: fish will die from lack of food, and CO2 will not be recycled properly back into the seas, resulting in a larger CO2 build-up planetwide.
What is this off-shore 3D seismic explosive surveying?
During exploration for oil and gas formations seismic airguns are towed with a vessel and release pulses of sounds from 225 to 250 decibels several times per minute (Richardson et al. 1995).
To put that number in perspective, the noise from a jet engine is 140 decibels—seismic airguns are 100,000 times more intense than a jet engine.
Airguns produce sound by creating a compressed air bubble, which collapses under the pressure of the water (Popper et al. 2005).
The surveys off the US Atlantic coast will have on average about 20,000,000 such explosions during the surveys.
It looks like this:
Dead plankton, stunned fish: the harms of man-made ocean noise (from June 2018 article)
Human-caused ocean noise and its dangers to marine life are the focus of meetings at the United Nations this week, a victory for advocacy groups that have long warned of this problem.
A boat tows 12-48 airguns at a time, each of which shoot loud blasts of compressed air. These blasts are EXPLOSIONS.
These sound waves pass through the water and hit the seabed, and penetrate deeply, up to 20 thousands of feet into rock layers, reflecting back information about buried oil and gas deposits that can be used to create three-dimensional maps.
The blasts are repeated every 12-15 seconds, over vast areas of the ocean at high volume, sometimes for weeks on end. The high volume damages internal structure of that which is in the seas, from the plankton which are the building blocks for higher life forms (food), through the larger organisms such as fish and marine mammals.
With that much penetration energy, what happens to ANYTHING in the water subject to the shock waves?
A review of 115 studies done mainly in the 1990s and 2000s, showed the effects of ocean noise on 66 species of fish and 36 kinds of invertebrates, or animals without a backbone.
Zooplankton were found to be highly vulnerable to seismic blasts. A 2007 study showed that one blast, even at a lower level than those typically used in oil and gas prospecting operations, could decimate half the zooplankton in the area.
Up to 95 percent of certain species died.
Zooplankton form the base of the foodchain, and are vital nutrition for whales and numerous invertebrates like oysters and shrimp.
Fish can suffer internal injuries and change their behavior. Becoming disoriented by the noise, they may swim away or freeze in place.
According to studies in 1996 and 2012, seismic airgun blasts caused haddock and cod to flee, reducing the catch rate by 20 to 70 percent in some areas.
Some fish swam deeper, where they could be more vulnerable, while others were caught with empty stomachs, a sign they had stopped eating.
To date, about 130 species have been documented to be impacted.
Necropsy analysis to brain damage from explosive shockwaves:
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