Seismic testing for oil harmful to marine life
Last month, the tiny Inuit town of Clyde River (pop. 1,100) in the Canadian Arctic won a landmark case at the Supreme Court of Canada in a remarkable takedown of the Goliath they had been fighting for six years.
The Goliath was a consortium of energy companies along with the National Energy Board, which approved the seismic survey to explore for oil in Baffin Bay and Davis Strait.
Despite intense distrust and antipathy from being hurt by Greenpeace actions in the past, Clyde River Inuit, in their desperation, reached out to the environmental group for help. Summoning a legal team, scientists, artists, Indigenous leaders and celebrities, the erstwhile enemies worked together to garner impressive public support, coming to a better understanding of one another in the process.
Clyde River argued, successfully, that Canada did not fulfil its constitutional duty to consult when the National Energy Board approved the seismic survey. These waters are rich in marine mammals that Inuit depend on; between 80 per cent and 90 per cent of the world’s narwhals live there, as well as polar bears, bowhead and beluga whales.
Clyde River Inuit, who truly rely on marine wildlife such as seals, whales and fish for their food security, were concerned that the constant intense, loud shots from seismic surveys, used to detect oil and gas deposits under the sea floor, would threaten their food source and thus their very existence and way of life.
As a marine biologist specializing in the impacts of human-caused noise on whales and other marine life, I can say definitively that they have good reason to be worried.
Virtually all marine life is sensitive to sound, as hearing is a more useful sense to have underwater than sight because sound travels so fast and so far underwater. Sight only extends to several meters underwater, whereas some whale calls can be heard over hundreds to thousands of kilometres.
Marine animals use sound to find prey, communicate, mate, sense their surroundings, orient, and detect hazards and predators — in other words, for all important aspects of their life. And seismic surveys produce the loudest human-made sounds in the ocean aside from explosions, with shots, produced by air released quickly under enormous pressure, going off every 10 seconds around the clock for months at a time. These shots have been heard at distances of 4,000 kilometres and are loud enough to penetrate hundreds of kilometres into the sea floor.
As more research is carried out, it is becoming increasingly clear how many marine species are affected by noise. Whales, especially the Arctic species, have consistently shown themselves to be sensitive to noise, but recently, research on species as diverse as fish, squid, crabs, lobsters, mussels and scallops has confirmed the same. Most alarmingly, a June 22 article in the prestigious scientific journal Nature revealed that even microscopic zooplankton can be devastated by seismic surveys.
Phytoplankton, the “grass” of the ocean, are at the base of the food web, but zooplankton, the grazers or the “grasshoppers” of the seas, are just above them, providing an essential food source not only for whales but also upon which the whole ocean ecosystem from fish to seabirds depends.
This field study reported that just a single airgun (seismic surveys usually consist of 12 to 48 air guns) caused a large kill-zone or “hole” in zooplankton, where their numbers were cut more than in half in most of the species. One-third of the zooplankton species even showed decreases in numbers of over 95 per cent. Shockingly, all immature krill (shrimplike plankton) were killed. The seismic airgun caused a two-to-three-fold increase in dead zooplankton overall, compared with controls.
These impacts extended out to at least 1.2 kilometres, the maximum range studied. The zooplankton “hole” could be detected via sonar 15 minutes after the airgun passed and was observed to continue to expand until about 90 minutes. The authors of the study conclude that their results have “enormous ramifications for . . . ocean health” given the long time and spatial scale of seismic surveys.
As such, the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision helped protect this area of the Arctic from further environmental degradation from seismic noise, at least for now.
This decision will preserve Inuit and their rich culture, reaffirming their Indigenous right to be consulted and for selfdetermination.