Kaua'i residents blast ocean acoustic testing
By Jan TenBruggencate
Advertiser KauaÎi Bureau
LIHU'E, Kaua'i — A proposal to reactivate the undersea sound generator off North Kaua'i ran into a tsunami of opposition last night in a public hearing in Lihu'e.
"I think this is something we should not do — not in good conscience," said acupuncturist Latifa Amdur.
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There will be another public hearing on the ATOC project tonight at 6 at the Kalanimoku Building, Room 132, 1151 Punchbowl St., Honolulu.
About 50 people attended the hearing, applauding some speakers and nodding in agreement with others. Despite its environmental applications and scientific studies that suggest it has no serious effect on marine life, critics citing environmental concerns attacked the North Pacific Acoustical Laboratory project.
Some speakers confused the project with the Navy's much louder low-frequency active sonar research, but others said adding sound at levels proposed by the NPAL project was equally unacceptable.
"I feel it is unnecessary to take any chance that we're doing any harm," said Jivan Francis Herzog, who said he studied the effects of noise on mammals in graduate school.
The state Board of Land and Natural Resources, which staged last night's hearing, must decide whether to issue a conservation
district use permit to allow NPAL to continue to use the seafloor power cable and underwater loudspeaker that were used for the earlier Acoustic Thermometry of Ocean Climate (ATOC) project.
NPAL is asking to operate the sound source for five years. Its operation would be the same as ATOC's — on every fourth day, there would be six 20-minute transmissions. The research project is funded by the Office of Naval Research and would be conducted by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the University of Washington's Applied Physics Laboratory.
The work is based on the theory that the changes in the speed of sound in the deep ocean can be used as a tool to measure changes in average temperature over broad oceanic basins. As water warms, sound travels faster through it.
"This, basically, is a very big thermometer ... This lets you measure what's happening through the whole North Pacific," said Scripps researcher Peter Worcester.
ATOC used noise generators off Kaua'i and California, and listening stations scattered in a broad arc across the North Pacific from California to the ocean floor off the Aleutian Islands. Worcester said the work found that temperature changes can be measured to within thousandths of a degree.
A Marine Mammal Research Project concluded that while there were some detectable changes in humpback whale behavior when the sound source was on, they were not significant. Many of last night's speakers challenged the conclusion, suggesting both that the research project was flawed and that some negative effects might not be easily gauged.
