Efforts to dial back dangerous underwater ocean noise won a victory earlier this month as a federal court agreed with environmentalists that the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) had illegally approved the U.S. Navy’s use of high-intensity, low-frequency sonar, the pulses from which are believed to harm mating, feeding, and social and migration patterns of whales and other marine mammals.
The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court’s three-judge panel on July 15 concluded that NMFS “did not give adequate protection to areas of the world’s oceans flagged by its own experts as biologically important. The result is that a meaningful proportion of the world’s marine mammal habitat is under-protected.” Among other areas, experts had recommended special protection for the Galapagos Islands, Hawai‘i’s Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument, and Bermuda’s Challenger Bank.
“The [court] understood that the navy can do more to reduce the risk of its powerful long-range sonar,” according to Michael Jasny, director of the Marine Mammal Protection Project at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), which filed the lawsuit in 2012. “Ignorance is no excuse for inaction where common-sense safeguards recommended by the government’s own scientists can prevent avoidable harm.”