sust-mar: believe it or not..a great story in the National Post...

Date: Mon, 1 Dec 2003 09:55:10 -0400
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From: tooker gomberg <greenspi@web.ca>
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From: Elizabeth May <emay@MAGMA.CA>

REMEMBER: PHONE CHRETIEN 613-992-4211, ANDERSON 819-997-1441, HAMM 902-424-6600

Seismic tests threaten N.S. sea life: prof
Blockade planned: Blasts would be heard halfway to Europe

Joseph Brean
National Post


Saturday, November 29, 2003

An oil rig is towed into Halifax's harbour on Thursday. Environmentalists
fear a plan to use sound guns to search for oil in the Gulf of St. Lawrence
will kill whales and other sea life.


CREDIT: Andrew Vaughan, The Canadian Press


ADVERTISEMENT

An Alberta oil company won approval yesterday to fire powerful sound guns
into the shallow waters off Cape Breton in its search for buried riches, but
already there are hints of a blockade by fishermen fearful of the impact on
their stocks.

For five years, Corridor Resources has tried to convince the Canada-Nova
Scotia Offshore Petroleum Board that seismic prospecting is safe for sea
life, and that a pocket of oil in the Gulf of St. Lawrence is far larger
than is currently known.

Their success sets the stage for six days of exploration, likely within a
week and certainly before the late-December freeze, in which a boat will
drag an array of air guns through the water, 16 kilometres offshore between
Margaree Harbour and Inverness, N.S.

Firing them downward allows scientists to measure the sound waves as they
reflect off the sea-floor, the bedrock, and perhaps the buried oil.

But the intense blasts -- so loud they can be heard halfway to Europe -- can
have dire effects on whales, fish and crustaceans.

Fred Kennedy, a spokesman for the area's crab fishery, said after he learned
of the approval that his members have talked of blockading Corridor's
research ship with their own.

Anything unfortunate enough to be swimming directly under the ship would be
crushed dead by the immense pressure of the sound waves. For that reason,
the prospectors will be required to start out with some quieter warning
blasts.

"I'm concerned about the whales, myself, really," said Rodney Donovan, who
runs whale-watching tours off Cape Breton in the summer and fishes crab the
rest of the year. "A blast like that, they can hear that quite a ways away
and if they are near, it's going to scare the s--- right out of them."

Snow crabs might fare worse. An environmental assessment for the board
suggested egg development in female crabs can be hampered by the sound
waves, and it is an open question what physiological damage might be done to
adult snow crabs. Overall, though, the province's regulator concluded their
mortality will not be affected. It did, however, acknowledge the possibility
for long-term damage to cod populations.

Barbara Pike, a spokeswoman for the regulator, said Corridor's ship will be
allowed to traverse 500 kilometres of straight lines in a grid pattern off
the west coast of Cape Breton. It is not the first to win approval to do so
-- there are roughly 10 seismic expeditions each year in the waters off Nova
Scotia -- but for the last three decades or so, they have only been done
hundreds of kilometres offshore, at the edge of the continental shelf.

Only two regions are protected: Georges Bank near the U.S. coast and an
underwater canyon near Sable Island called The Gully, but even that is
surrounded on all sides by exploration zones. Environmentalists and
scientists had hoped to include Cape Breton on that list, too.

Hal Whitehead, who holds the Killam Chair of Biology at Dalhousie University
and runs a whale research laboratory that has investigated the effects of
seismic testing, said the blasts present two main dangers to sea life. The
sounds might hurt them physically, by breaking their eardrums, for example,
but the major fear is that they will be scared from their feeding grounds
and migratory routes.

The application grant includes a restriction that blasts cannot be set off
if a whale has been spotted within a kilometre, but this restriction is not
foolproof.

"You have to remember whales spend much of their time under water" and they
are tough to spot in rough water and darkness, Prof. Whitehead said.

Research in Europe in recent weeks has suggested an even more dire effect --
that whales can be killed by loud noises.

Scientists found whales in regions of military testing often died of "the
bends," or decompression sickness, when they surfaced too quickly to avoid
the noise. There is also a theoretical possibility, Prof. Whitehead said,
that the intense noise itself causes bubbles to form in the whales' blood.

In areas of seismic testing but no military activity off the coast of
England, whales have washed up dead showing exactly these physiological
symptoms, suggesting the blasts can be seriously debilitating, he said.

In the longer term, the dangers cease to be just about loud noises.

"These people would not be doing seismic if there was not some chance of
them being able to develop the area, and when they do that, then you get
into a whole other range of sounds as well as chemicals," Prof. Whitehead
said.

Mr. Donovan, the crab fisherman and whale guide, is more charitable to the
prospectors and said economic expansion on struggling Cape Breton might make
some of the risks more palatable.

"If it didn't hurt anything, I wouldn't have nothing to say against it," he
said. "I have nothing against anybody starting a company and creating jobs."

jbrean@nationalpost.com

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