NAUTICAL NOISE
SONIC SEA HEADLINES FILM FESTIVAL
Film festival
Vancouver Festival of Ocean Films Sunday, 3-10 p.m. | Vancity Theatre, 1181 Seymour St. Tickets | $15-$25 at eventbrite.ca
If you literally dip below the surface on the issue of the marine environment, you’ll understand there is a massive sound-pollution problem.
Propeller noise, naval sonar testing, oil-company exploration explosions, and cruise ships are all causing a cetacean-killing clamour.
Directed by Daniel Hinerfeld of the Natural Resources Defense Council, the documentary Sonic Sea is a sobering account of the issue of ocean noise.
“It’s out of sight, it’s out of mind,” Hinerfeld said in a recent telephone interview from Los Angeles. “The biggest challenge in making this film, frankly, is that it is a film about sound — the way sound functions in an environment that is not ours.”
Sonic Sea is one of the two feature-length films to headline the Vancouver Festival of Ocean Films at Vancity Theatre on Sunday. Coinciding with World Oceans Day, the Georgia Strait Alliance-hosted festival also includes the documentary Atlantic that looks at the struggles of fishing communities in Ireland, Norway and Newfoundland.
In its eighth year, the festival is an accessible way to educate and entertain people about the threats to, and joys of, oceans.
“I believe art is a powerful tool of social change,” said Christianne Wilhelmson, executive director of the Georgia Strait Alliance. “So bringing together different artistic mediums as a means of telling stories about the world we live in and the threats to our oceans is a perfect melding. We find at the festival people who wouldn’t come to a night where we had a scientist speaking or wouldn’t necessarily read our blogs will come to the festival because they love film.”
Vancouver-based Michael Jasny, a senior policy analyst at NRDC, echoes the need to get the sonic story out there.
He and other experts in the film are adamant that we can no longer afford to ignore what is going on below the surface in our oceans.
“It is no longer just about strandings, although that remains important, but it’s about this daily assault on the fundamental ability of whales and other marine life to thrive in the ocean,” Jasny said.
Sonic Sea is just over an hour of amazing images, stunning graphics, pitch-perfect sound design and engaging experts from around the globe, including orca scientists from Hanson Island, B.C.
“We are injecting so much noise we are basically acoustically bleaching the ocean. All the singing voices are lost in that cloud of noise,” Cornell University marine bioacoustics expert Chris Clark says in the film.
How much noise? Well, experts say the amount is doubling every 10 years. Clark makes the point that some whales live to 150-200 years old, so when they were teenagers, the world was quiet.
The dominant change in underwater noise is commercial shipping. About 98 per cent of what we move, we move on the oceans. The NRDC, which has been fighting for the environment since 1970, reports there are 60,000 ships on the water at any given time. The propellers of ships produce cavitation bubbles that burst underwater, creating loud hissing sounds.
Here’s another fact: In the days following the 9/11 attacks on the U.S., shipping decreased and so did the levels of stress hormones found in the fecal samples of whales.
Other culprits are sonar. The United States navy is a big player in this part of the issue. The SOSUS system, originally used to track Russian submarines, is a chain of underwater listening posts that span the globe.
The deployment of this sound-shocking system has reportedly caused decompression sickness in whales. The navy has been sued by the NRDC and other organizations numerous times over sound-related issues. But despite its actions, Hinerfeld has some hope that maybe times are changing. Well, at least with some navy types.
“Sonic Sea actually screened at the U.S. Naval Academy” Hinerfeld said. “I think there is a new generation of sailors. I think young officers in the United States navy these days have science degrees. They are marine biologists. They have a real understanding, many of them, of what’s going on under the surface of the ocean, and I’m somewhat hopeful we are going to see more thoughtful practices.”
So there might be hope with the navy, but if history is any indication the other big sound culprit in this story — oil companies — will be a challenge. Currently they are doing seismic prospecting using airgun blasts that emit approximately decibel blasts toward the ocean floor in the search for oil reservoirs.
According to Greenpeace, that level of noise above ground is “approximately eight times louder than a jet engine taking off.”
With every beached goose-beak whale and starving Orca the reality seems dire, but Jasny and others suggest with support and time this marine mess can be turned around.
“The Port of Vancouver and the Port of Prince Rupert are probably leading the field, for ports anyway, for trying to tackle this issue. They are using an incentive program at both those ports,” Jasny said.
A study on ship speed is set for later this summer. The ports will incentivize ships by reducing birthing fees for ships with quiet technologies.
The U.S. navy says it will pay more attention to where and when they do their testing and training, in other words making sure there isn’t a pod of Orcas in the area.
“It’s been said many times before that the environment is never saved, it is always in the process of being saved,” Jasny said.
“Every generation has to confront new threats and fight them for the sake of the planet and humanity’s future.” And sometimes the call to arms comes from a film like Sonic Sea.