Jim Robbins

YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK, Wyo. — Late last year, Jeff Carter happened upon Steamboat Geyser, the tallest active geyser in the world, just before it erupted.

“It was so much louder and higher and stronger than anything I had seen, almost frightening,” he said.

“People around us were so emotional, just cheering and roaring,” Carter said. “This old fellow who had it on his bucket list was so verklempt when the geyser erupted, it was neat.”

All but dormant for years, Steamboat is erupting fairly frequently these days, and more people like Carter are getting to witness it.

While Old Faithful is a global icon of punctual eruption — it usually erupts every 90 minutes or so — it is the exception among geothermal features. Most of Yellowstone National Park’s 1,000 or so geysers are far more unpredictable.

Many geysers, like Steamboat, are quiet and then suddenly come to life. Steamboat sometimes jets water to heights of 300 to 400 feet — far higher than Old Faithful’s top height of 185 feet — for anywhere from a few minutes to about an hour.

After erupting, Steamboat — in Norris Geyser Basin, the park’s hottest — goes into a ferocious, churning steam phase that can last two days. Early this month, Steamboat was shooting clouds of white steam in huge volumes, sounding like a jet engine or a giant foam steamer for a latte.

There were only very occasional eruptions until last March when Steamboat blasted off. It has erupted every week or two since. It set a record with 32 eruptions in 2018, besting its total of 29 set in 1964. It has continued that pace of eruptions in 2019 and last erupted Feb. 1.

Ear Spring Geyser in the park’s Upper Geyser Basin also recently woke. On Sept. 15, the bubbling, ear-shaped spring erupted, throwing up coins, a cinder block, a baby pacifier and other objects that had been tossed into it over the decades. It was only its fourth eruption in the past 60 years.

Giant Geyser in the park has also been unusually active. And new vents and fissures have formed in some of the park’s geothermal areas.

What has stirred these grand geysers out of their years of slumber? It’s hard to say precisely. “These geysers are incredibly dynamic,” said Michael Poland, a federal geophysicist who studies the massive caldera for the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory. “Over time their conduit systems expand and contract as minerals precipitate in them and close them up, and the pressure builds and reams them out again.”

Add to that large annual swings in the amount of snow and rain, which can change the level of the below-ground reservoirs, and a constant jiggling of the landscape. “We have an average of 1,500 locatable earthquakes every year,” said Jeff Hungerford, a park geologist. “That acts as an agitator to the system and allows some of these geysers to keep open.”

One thing the changes don’t mean is that the magma-filled supervolcano under the park is going to blow. Caldera activity is constantly monitored, and there would be years if not decades of warning signs before a major eruption occurred.

The park’s geysers and other geothermal features — some 10,000 mud pots, hot springs and fumaroles, the largest cluster in the world — are driven by Yellowstone’s location above the caldera. As water on the surface seeps below ground, it hits the magma and comes to a boil, which forces the superheated water and steam upward through a labyrinthine network of fissures, fractures and other plumbing.

The Geyser Observation and Study Association, colloquially known as the geyser gazers, is a group that spends hours watching simmering geysers and recording their every sputter, pop and blast and posting the information online.

And now that Steamboat is in a lively phase, it’s the talk of the park.

Carter remembers what happened a few years ago, before this new spurt of activity.

In early September of 2014, he saw rangers rushing to something.

“There’s a saying here that if you see rangers running, follow them because they are running away from something dangerous or toward something really great,” Carter said.

One of them shouted “Steamboat is going off!”

“So I grabbed my coat. But my wife said, ‘If you miss your daughter’s volleyball game for a geyser eruption you will never live it down.'” Carter, who owns a motel in West Yellowstone, glumly took his seat and missed what he feared might have been his only chance to see Steamboat erupt.

Fortunately, he did get another opportunity. “I’ve seen a lot of the big geysers go off in Yellowstone,” he said, “but the eruption of Steamboat really exceeded my expectations.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/08/science/steamboat-geyser-yellowstone.html" id="c1ea03cd-4bf2-3aa1-ad58-2ca814e04a72">The New York Times</a>.

(Trilobites)

Yellowstone's Steamboat Geyser Is Gushing at a Record Pace

Then it became less predictable. But instrument data alone can’t tell the jet stream’s movements for comparison over the centuries, given that scientists began keeping records of weather events via instruments only in the late 19th century.

The rings of trees, however, offer a far more complete historical picture of climate variations. As they age, trees grow outward from the center, and each year a new, distinct circle of dead wood is created around the trunk of most trees. In that ring, one can find information about precipitation, temperature and other data about that year.

A team led by Valerie Trouet, a dendrochronologist, sampled 400 trees from the Balkans and 200 in Scotland — including what might be the oldest known tree in Europe, a Bosnian pine in Greece named Adonis, which is 1,075 years old. The jet stream flows between these two regions, and trees revealed the range of temperatures in their rings and the frequency of fires over time, an expansive chronicling of jet stream behavior.

“More extreme positions create more extreme climate events, especially heat waves and storms,” in Europe, Trouet said. And the tree rings show “big fires happen in the Balkans when the jet is in its southerly position.”

The fact that the stream has become more variable only in recent decades suggests that the shift is the result of humans’ effects on climate, Trouet said. “The recent rise in variance is unprecedented in 300 years,” she said. More analysis is underway to look back to even earlier centuries.

Reading the climate stories these trees tell will help with forecasting. “One of the big questions in the field is what’s going to happen to the jet stream,” Trouet said. “This data helps the modeling of climate change become more reliable.”

Trees, it seems, are giant organic recording devices that contain information about past climate, civilizations, ecosystems and even galactic events, much of it many thousands of years old.

In recent years, the techniques for extracting information from tree rings has been honed and expanded. New technologies and techniques are able to pry a much deeper and wider range of information out of trees.

The field “has exploded,” said Edward Cook, director of the tree ring lab at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

The Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona in Tucson was founded in the 1930s by A.E. Douglass, an astronomer who turned to trees to better understand the connection between sunspots and climate.

The lab has helped establish other labs around the world, which in turn has rapidly increased the number of studied trees. There are now roughly a dozen large labs globally and data from 4,000 sites on all continents except Antarctica. The information is stored in the International Tree Ring Data Bank, a library open to all researchers. As more tree data becomes available, a much richer picture forms of the nexus of past climate, ecosystems and human civilization.

For its first 80 years, the lab was located in much smaller — and noisier — quarters under the University of Arizona football stadium. “If you worked on Saturdays, you could hear people in the bleachers stamping their feet,” said Russ Monson, who studies plant physiology in Tucson.

In 2012, the lab moved into a larger building to accommodate its growing mission and number of researchers — now some 70 or so — and to unpack its vast collection of tree rings and core samples. There are now more than a half-million samples, from slivers to an enormous slice of giant sequoia in the lobby, a large enough table top, perhaps, to seat all of King Arthur’s knights. The building houses the world’s largest collection of tree ring samples.

The basement storage area resembles a coffee-table wood shop, infused with the fragrant perfume of cut wood. Hundreds of 2-inch-thick slices of large trees, their rich grains sanded and polished, are stacked on their sides.

The lab also houses a slice of the bristlecone pine that was cut down in the 1960s by a graduate student named Donald Rusk Currey from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It wasn’t until after he felled the tree and counted the rings that he realized, to his horror, that he had, with permission from the U.S. Forest Service, unceremoniously chopped down the oldest known tree in the world — a stately gnarled pine called Prometheus.

Research involving tree rings is divided into three main categories — dendroclimatology, the analysis of tree rings for past climate data; dendroarchaeology, the study of tree rings to understand how past climate affected human societies; and dendroecology, which reconstructs past forest ecosystems.

At this particular time, the most essential role for tree rings is probably their use in reconstructing past climate and providing much greater context. “The instrumental period provides a snapshot” of past climate, said David Meko, a researcher at the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research, “but the tree rings are a panorama.”

This window into the deep climate past has become vital in a rapidly warming world, to show how the climate of the last half-century is far outside the historical norms going back thousands of years.

Living bristlecone pine trees, for example, are several thousand years old and their information is added to by those that died thousands of years ago, but remained intact in their cold, dry high-altitude environment.

It’s hard to argue with tree rings that huge environmental changes are not occurring. Climate change seen in the past six or seven decades has few, if any, comparisons in the far past, researchers say.

The current two-decade-long drought on the Colorado River, for instance, is the longest since medieval times when a drought lasted for 62 years — with no very wet years in between dry years. An occasional very wet year can make a long drought more bearable.

Moreover, conditions in some recent years are the hottest and driest in many centuries. “We keep breaking records year after year,” Meko said. “It’s a little worrisome to see the most extreme years right near the present.”

Unprecedented hot droughts, like the current one, make a decline in precipitation even worse, by causing more evaporation. Officials along the Colorado River are deeply worried about the trend toward warmer temperatures and less precipitation and are preparing for a grim future without or with less river water — unthinkable just 20 years ago. (This year, though, was an El Niño year, and the snowpack in the Colorado Rockies was well above average.)

To make matters worse, tree rings show that water in the Colorado River was apportioned to states based on flow from 1905 to 1922, some of the wettest years in the last 12 centuries, an era known as a pluvial period.

Researchers can also look at snowpack in tree ring records. In 2015, in the Sierras the snowpack was the lowest in 500 years. This year may be one of the highest snowpacks in decades, a testament perhaps to climate whiplash. Researchers here are reconstructing snowpack data by examining tree ring records across the entire western United States for the last 2,000 years.

Trees hold other valuable information as well. Oxygen isotope analysis, for example, has unlocked the source of the water that a tree took up centuries ago and can determine whether it was from a hurricane or a severe thunderstorm.

Tree rings also provide a glimpse into the possible global effects of geoengineering — a proposal to scatter aluminum sulfate into the atmosphere to block the sun and cool the planet, which some scientists have proposed as a solution to climate change.

“Volcanic eruptions are the best proxy of geoengineering,” Trouet said. Rings analyzed from trees in five locations around the world show that after a volcano erupted in 1568, the global climate cooled considerably for two years — evidenced in narrow tree rings — and the northern edge of the tropics receded as the planet cooled.

Those tree rings also showed that during six decades, from 1568 until 1634, there was, because of natural climate variation, six decades of expansion of the subtropics, which pushed desert climates north. Because of expanding zones of hot and dry weather, the Ottoman Empire in Turkey went into decline, the Ming dynasty collapsed and the Jamestown colony was abandoned, suggesting, Trouet said, they were, in part at least, climate-related. “The way society handles a drought politically is also part of the picture,” she said.

Other sources — lake sediments; ice core samples; coral; the otolith, or ear bone, of fish; and even the shells from living and long dead geoducks, a large bivalve with a snakelike appendage — add to the broader picture.

“We have divers sucking up ancient geoducks off the ocean floor,” said Bryan Black, a professor of dendrochronology who also specializes in marine organisms. Combined with long dead geoduck shells, data could go back many thousands of years. Shells from the coast of Iceland already go back 1,000 years. “They show that the last century is unprecedentedly warm,” Black said.

Experts are using the shell ring information, combined with tree ring data, to understand how climate drives ocean productivity and the species mix of fish, to assist fisheries managers. “The bottom line is to be aware of climate whiplash and what that means for fisheries,” Black said.

Even the stars give up some of their secrets to trees. The sun and other stars emit radiation called Galactic Cosmic Rays, or GCRs, that react in the atmosphere with nitrogen and change the levels of carbon 14, which is taken up by every living thing and becomes a tracer for cosmic ray levels.

Past spikes in GCRs from solar flares or other sources are largely a mystery, but have attracted keen interest from researchers, because if they occur now they could wipe out communication satellites and other technology. An event in A.D. 744, first found in Japanese cedar trees and since found globally, is the strongest cosmic ray event in the tree ring record, a magnitude larger than the Carrington event, a solar storm in 1859, and apparently noted by people alive at the time.

“This year also appeared in the heavens a red crucifix, after sunset,” was how the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles reported the event in the mid-eighth century.

It was most likely a huge solar flare. “It is unprecedented, there’s nothing else like it,” said Charlotte Pearson, a professor at the tree ring lab. “We’re trying to work out what it is and what caused it but we’re still not sure.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="434191d0-3ceb-4853-ac7a-4bb8071fcc7d" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/30/science/tree-rings-climate.html">The New York Times</a>.

(Science Times): TUCSON, Ariz. — From the early 1700s until the 1960s, the fast moving river of wind known as the North Atlantic Jet Stream, which drives weather extremes over Europe, was pretty steady on its course.

The tales in the tree rings

<h1>HELENA, Mont. — Federal wildlife officials are proposing to strip endangered species protections from the gray wolf populations in the Lower 48 states, citing significant increases in their numbers across much of the nation.</h1>

The decision, announced Wednesday by David Bernhardt, the acting secretary of the Interior Department, is likely to set off another round of court battles. Conservationists and biologists contend that some areas of the country, like the Adirondacks in New York and the southern Rocky Mountains, could be suitable habitats, but wolf populations in those regions are vulnerable and still need protection to recover.

The gray wolf populations had dwindled to about 1,000 in the Lower 48 states when they received protection under the Endangered Species Act in 1975. But since their reintroduction to various regions, mostly in the West, the wolves’ numbers have rebounded to about 5,000.

“Recovery of the gray wolf under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) is one of our nation’s great conservation successes,” the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said in a statement, “with the wolf joining other cherished species, such as the bald eagle, that have been brought back from the brink with the help of the ESA.”

Bernhardt made the delisting proposal public Wednesday in a speech to the North American Wildlife and Natural Resources Conference in Denver, but it is not yet official. The proposed rule will be published in the Federal Register, with a period of time made available for public comment.

The Obama administration had also proposed removing the wolves’ endangered status in 2013, but federal courts rejected the move.

Even before Bernhardt was named as acting secretary of the Interior Department, administration officials and Republicans in Congress had begun efforts to weaken the Endangered Species Act. And Bernhardt has come under fire for potential conflicts in a debate over protections for the smelt, a tiny fish at the center of one of the latest rounds of California’s water wars.

Once considered only a varmint, wolves were extirpated from nearly all of their range through a campaign of bounty hunting, trapping, the killing of pups in the den with dynamite and even biological warfare as trappers introduced mange into wolf populations.

When the wolves received protection, much of the population was limited to northern Minnesota. In the mid-1990s, they were reintroduced into Yellowstone National Park and Idaho, where their numbers have taken off. They have spread into neighboring states, including Utah, Oregon, Washington and California.

As their numbers grew, ranchers have had to contend with wolves’ appetite for cattle and sheep. And while hunters contend that wolves have decimated elk and other game in certain regions, conservationists point to the benefits that the predators provide: keeping deer, elk and other species in check and therefore reducing their effect on vegetation.

The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association applauded the plan for delisting, and said it should have happened sooner. In a joint statement, Jennifer Houston, president of the group, and Bob Skinner, president of the Public Lands Council, contended that the Endangered Species Act “rarely functions as Congress intended.”

“Radical environmental activists use an endless cycle of lawsuits and procedural tricks,” to thwart delisting, they said.

The animals are prolific breeders and while they are hunted and trapped, they are managed by state wildlife agencies that limit how many can be killed.

Losing the endangered status protection concerns conservationists, who worry that new populations won’t become established in areas where the wolf is present but not yet stable.

“Stripping protections from wolves now would halt further recovery from places where wolves once lived and could live again,” said Collette Adkins, carnivore conservation director for the Center for Biological Diversity. “Without protections in the Adirondacks or Maine or the southern Rockies we don’t have any hope of recovery.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="f9f6db3a-54a6-411f-834e-7da01751dcdf" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/06/science/gray-wolves-endangered-species.html">The New York Times</a>.

Gray Wolves may lose endangered status and protections

The decision, announced Wednesday by David Bernhardt, the acting secretary of the Interior Department, is likely to set off another round of court battles.

<h1>ELY, Nev. — A crew of five wildlife biologists wearing overalls, helmets and headlamps walked up the flanks of a juniper-studded mountain and climbed through stout steel bars to enter an abandoned mine that serves as a bat hibernaculum.</h1>

The swinging white light of the headlamps probed cracks and crevices in the walls of the long dark and narrow tunnel, as the team walked half a mile into the earth. When they spied a bat, they gently plucked the mouse-sized, chestnut brown mammal — Townsend’s long eared and Western small footed are the two most abundant species here — off the walls and deposited them in white cloth bags. A lone big brown bat was also gathered.

At one point a bat, disturbed by the scientific ruckus, fluttered by, the headlamps illuminating its membranous, négligée-thin wings.

During the survey in November, the bats were in their pre-hibernation phase, clinging to the gray rock wall with tiny grappling hook-like feet, gently breathing. They are in full hibernation mode now.

“They are biologically interesting,” said Catherine G. Haase, a postdoctoral researcher from Montana State University, as she affectionately handled a docile bat. “And they are really cute.”

Cute, interesting and facing a deeply uncertain future. This foray is part of a continentwide effort, from Canada to Oklahoma, to plumb mines and caves in hopes of figuring out how a virulent and rapidly spreading invasive fungal bat disease called white-nose syndrome, which is bearing down on the West, will behave when it hits the native populations here.

“White-nose syndrome represents one of the most consequential wildlife diseases of modern times,” wrote the authors of one recent paper published in mSphere, a journal of the American Society for Microbiology. Since 2006, “the disease has killed millions of bats and threatens several formerly abundant species with extirpation or extinction.”

White-nose syndrome, caused by the fungus Pseudogymnoascus destructans (Pd), is named for the fuzzy spots that appear on bats’ noses and wings.

Over the last decade state, federal and tribal agencies, along with nonprofit organizations, have been working around the country to try to get ahead of the disease and find a remedy to save the 47 species of bats in North America. So far the syndrome has defied the efforts.

After some 30 animals were gathered from the mine walls, the researchers hiked back out of the tunnel, disrobed and put their clothes into plastic bags to launder, and washed their helmets and other equipment with alcohol to avoid inadvertently spreading the fungus, should it be present.

Then they took the bags with their tiny quarry into a small, white windowless trailer stuffed with an animal MRI and a respirometer with a tangle of dozens of clear plastic tubes, to weigh and measure the bats in several different ways.

“This research will inform us which bats will be susceptible and which will be resistant, which will inform a conservation and intervention strategy,” said Sarah H. Olson, associate director of wildlife health for the Wildlife Conservation Society.

The disease was discovered in a cave in Schoharie County outside of Albany, New York, in 2006, most likely introduced inadvertently from Eurasia. Since then, the pathogen has spread to at least 36 states and seven provinces of Canada, killing whole colonies of bats. Researchers have described finding cave floors littered with bat carcasses, sometimes many thousands in a single cave. So far more than 6 million bats have died in Canada and the United States.

Their loss could be consequential: Bats play a critical ecological role, pollinating plants in some places and controlling mosquitoes and other insects.

Having ravaged much of the East Coast and infecting an isolated, outlier region near Seattle, white-nose syndrome is heading deep into the West at the rate of about a state per year, and has appeared on the eastern edge of the region, killing bats in South Dakota, Oklahoma and eastern Wyoming.

That means in the next few years it could reach the thousands of caves and abandoned mines of the Rocky Mountains, the redoubts of overwintering bats. “Hibernating bats are most likely to be affected,” said Jonathan Reichard, assistant coordinator for the Fish and Wildlife Service’s program on white-nose syndrome.

Biologists have just begun searching caves in the West to see where new infections may have occurred during this winter.

A great deal about white-nose syndrome is unknown, as is a good deal of the behavior and attributes of bats. The arid west has a different bat ecology than the more humid regions of the East. Scientists believe the key to devising a strategy to combat the disease may involve a better understanding of the bats’ hibernation physiology.

But as decimating as the disease is, there are experts who think efforts to treat or even research the disease is wrongheaded, a waste of money that could do more harm than good.

The National Speleological Society, a group of cave explorers who also study and work for the conservation of caves, opposes these kinds of efforts, especially the blanket closing of caves to the public to keep the disease from spreading. We “deplore current actions,” they wrote in a letter to then Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, last year.

Merlin Tuttle, a bat expert in Texas, also thinks these multiagency efforts to stem the disease are foolhardy and may harm the bats. “Disrupting them during hibernation is adding stress at a time they can least afford it,” he said.

“There’s no practical way at all to slow or stop this, to get rid of it in the wild, it’s already in thousands and thousands of roosts,” he said. “It should be allowed to run its course. We’re just wasting money when we try to find a cure. We should be spending our money on getting the maximum protection for the bats that have survived and helping them recover and rebuild populations.”

When they fall into their big sleep, from November to April, bats are in torpor, a state where they dial down their physiology — heart rate, respiration and the like — for three weeks at a time. A waking heart rate of 750 beats per minute drops to 150 during torpor. Then, for two days, they rouse themselves to drink water, mate and take care of other business before they sink into slumber again.

Instead of rousing every three weeks, though, infected bats wake every seven days, because white-nose illness causes dehydration and they need to drink. While the roused period is small, it is physiologically expensive.

“During torpor they burn almost no energy,” said Nathan W. Fuller, a postdoctoral biologist from Texas Tech who is part of the team, as he prepared to place bats in jars with plastic tubing to measure their inhalations and exhalations. “During arousal they burn a lot. Even though it’s only 5 percent of their time, it’s 95 percent of their energy. It really comes down to how often they arouse.”

Expending more energy depletes the fat they store to make it through hibernation, and they become emaciated during dormancy. They can die in the cave, or starving, leave the cave early to search for food only to find the world snow-covered, locked in a winter they can’t survive.

That’s why this team has spent so much time and money on high-end, highly-sensitive equipment to fathom the secrets of bat hibernation. “We can get respirometry from a single fruit fly,” said Fuller proudly as he stood before the stack of equipment that makes up the respirometer.

In addition, the little mammals are placed in a long, clear plexiglass tube and slid into an MRI machine. In just a few minutes their muscle mass, fat and water levels are measured.

Once the baseline data are established, “in areas like this where it’s not yet arrived, we can form a predictive model based on ecology, physiology, genetics and skin chemistry,” Reichard said.

Biologists have considered putting food in caves, or feeding bats probiotics or electrolytes or applying chemical skin treatments to kill the fungus. They have talked about dehumidifiers. In some places they have fogged the caves with antifungal agents such as B-23, which is made from the stems of wild pineapples.

Exposing infected bats to ultra violet light shows promise and is being tested. “UV light can kill the fungus in the lab but we don’t have a feasible deployment scheme,” Reichard said.

Tuttle cautions that such experiments could go awry. “Using something to kill the fungus is going to kill other fungi or microorganisms in the cave that will cause other chain reactions and problems that are far greater than what we started with,” he said. Treated bats may also get reinfected.

While researchers are focused on the here and now, a warming world is expected to play a role in the future of bats, and perhaps this disease, though it’s too early to say how.

“The temperature of a cave is the same as the mean outside temperature,” Fuller said. “So bats will use more energy while they are in torpor as it warms. Climate change will play a role.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="2f9f4c18-284e-42cf-b21f-d236106b8f0c" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/18/science/bats-white-nose-syndrome.html">The New York Times</a>.

The swinging white light of the headlamps probed cracks and crevices in the walls of the long dark and narrow tunnel, as the team walked half a mile into the earth.

Saving the bats, one cave at a time

<h1>Slow-moving, hulking ships crisscross miles of ocean in a lawn mower pattern, wielding an array of 12 to 48 air guns blasting pressurized air repeatedly into the depths of the ocean.</h1>

The sound waves hit the sea floor, penetrating miles into it, and bounce back to the surface, where they are picked up by hydrophones. The acoustic patterns form a three-dimensional map of where oil and gas most likely lie.

The seismic air guns probably produce the loudest noise that humans use regularly underwater, and it is about to become far louder in the Atlantic. As part of the Trump administration’s plans to allow offshore drilling for gas and oil exploration, five companies have been given permits to carry out seismic mapping with the air guns all along the Eastern Seaboard, from central Florida to the Northeast, for the first time in three decades. The surveys have not started yet in the Atlantic, but now that the ban on offshore drilling has been lifted, companies can be granted access to explore regions along the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific.

And air guns are now the most common method companies use to map the ocean floor.

“They fire approximately every 10 seconds around the clock for months at a time,” said Douglas Nowacek, a professor of marine conservation technology at Duke University. “They have been detected 4,000 kilometers away. These are huge, huge impacts.”

The prospect of incessant underwater sonic tests is the latest example cited by environmentalists and others of the growing problem of ocean noise, spawning lawsuits against some industries and governments as well as spurring more research into the potential dangers for marine life.

Some scientists say the noises from air guns, ship sonar and general tanker traffic can cause the gradual or even outright death of sea creatures, from the giants to the tiniest — whales, dolphins, fish, squid, octopuses and even plankton. Other effects include impairing animals’ hearing, brain hemorrhaging and the drowning out of communication sounds important for survival, experts say.

So great is the growing din in the world’s oceans that experts fear it is fundamentally disrupting the marine ecosystem, diminishing populations of some species as the noise levels disturb feeding, reproduction and social behavior.

A 2017 study, for example, found that a loud blast, softer than the sound of a seismic air gun, killed nearly two-thirds of the zooplankton in three-quarters of a mile on either side. Tiny organisms at the bottom of the food chain, zooplankton provide a food source for everything from great whales to shrimp. Krill, a tiny crustacean vital to whales and other animals, were especially hard hit, according to one study.

“Researchers saw a complete absence of life around the air gun,” said Michael Jasny, director of marine mammal protection for the Natural Resources Defense Council, one of several environmental groups suing the federal government in an effort to stop the seismic surveys.

Measuring the Sounds of Commerce

Each seismic shot from the air guns is estimated to reach up to 260 decibels. Container ships, another noisemaker on the seas, make sounds up to 190 decibels. (The launch of a space shuttle, by contrast, reaches about 160 decibels for those nearby. )

Every 10 decibels is an order of magnitude. An explosion of 260 decibels, then, is 10 million times more intense than the sound of a container ship. Because water is much denser than air, sound travels underwater about four times faster and much farther than above the sea’s surface.

“At any one time, there are 20, 30 or 40 seismic surveys going on around the world,” for oil and gas exploration, as well as for geological research, Nowacek said.

All told in the first year of the newly approved exploration, more than 5 million of these huge explosions would occur all along the United States’ eastern coastline.

Christopher Clark, a senior researcher in the bioacoustics program at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, who has studied whale communication for 40 years, described the noise as a “living hell” for undersea life, which is exquisitely tuned to sound.

A coalition of environmental groups has filed suit against the National Marine Fisheries Service, a division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, claiming the agency is violating several federal laws protecting wildlife, including the Endangered Species Act, by allowing the blasts. And governors from 10 states have protested the offshore drilling decision and are seeking to join the legal action.

Harming or injuring marine mammals is forbidden under the Marine Mammal Protection Act. In November, NOAA issued five authorizations allowing seismic exploration companies to “incidentally, but not intentionally, harass marine mammals.” Because of the government shutdown, other government action to begin testing has been postponed until at least March 1.

The companies involved in the exploration disagree sharply with the claims of harm. “More than 50 years of extensive surveying and scientific research indicate that the risk of direct physical injury to marine mammals is extremely low,” Gail Adams-Jackson, vice president of communications for the International Association of Geophysical Contractors, said in a statement. She contended that the groups’ efforts are solely aimed at stopping offshore exploration and development.

The companies and NOAA Fisheries said that the effects on marine life could be kept to a minimum by careful monitoring and mitigation, which would involve acoustic monitoring to detect mammal vocalizations and shutting down exploration when sensitive species like the endangered North Atlantic right whales are observed.

There are no more than 400 to 500 of the migratory right whales, which can grow up to 60 feet long, and calve and nurse their young from North Carolina to Florida. Right whales are already emaciated and stressed by a warmer ocean — they live in the Gulf of Maine, which has warmed considerably more than other bodies of water. Reproduction has been drastically reduced. And the seismic noise can mask ship sounds, resulting in collisions, another leading danger for the whales.

“We require strong protections for North American right whales in areas where they are expected to be present, including all designated habitat,” Benjamin Laws, a NOAA biologist said, defending the issuance of the permits.

Carrying Sound Across the Ocean

Years of constant blasts could be extremely harmful, others argue, and not just for right whales. Because of the way sound reverberates in the ocean, the noise can be unrelenting.

“Prolonged chronic stress of any kind is bad, because it shunts resources away from reproduction,” Nowacek said. “It presses your adrenal glands to produce adrenaline and stress hormones, causes weight loss and immunosuppression.”

In a landmark study, when ship traffic greatly decreased after the events of Sept. 11, 2001, researchers noted a significant drop in stress hormones in the feces of right whales in the Bay of Fundy in Canada, the first evidence that ship noise can cause chronic stress in whales.

Moreover, acoustic communication is primary in the marine ecosystem, where visibility is so limited. Many whale species are highly intelligent, social beings and communicate in the clicks, moaning, singing and calling of their own languages. Some whales, and orcas (the largest in the dolphin family despite their killer whale designation), hunt prey through echolocation, a kind of natural sonar.

“Sound can travel enormous distances very fast and whales have evolved to take advantage of that,” said Clark, who has listened to whales near Ireland from coastal Virginia. “They can hear storms a thousand miles away.”

Aside from the seismic noise, compounded sounds from container ships to navy sonar are posing a problem for marine life. As the number of ships moving around the world has increased significantly in recent years, cavitation, the noise from the synchronous collapse of bubbles created by a ship’s propeller, as well as the rumble of ship engines, poses a bigger and bigger problem. A recent study found that shipping noise could double by 2030.

Noise masks whale expressions between families, which can affect orientation, feeding, care of young, detection of prey and even increase aggression. Already 80 percent of communications of some species of whales is masked by noise, according to models assessed by a team of biologists.

“It’s ripping the communications system apart,” Clark said. “And every aspect of their lives is dependent on sound, including finding food.”

About 20,000 known species of fish are able to hear, and some 800 species are known to make sounds of their own to hunt, mate, navigate and communicate. One fish, the plainfish midshipman, for example, sings to the females to mate and defends nests with barking sounds.

Other studies show that beaked whales are extremely sensitive to noise, and in frantic efforts to escape seismic air guns or navy sonar they have been forced to change their dive patterns to the surface. Some have died from decompression sickness.

Loud noises can also affect behavior and even ecosystems by altering where species go. In 2008 in Canada’s Baffin Bay, seismic testing is believed to have delayed the southward migration of narwhals — the whales with the long spiral tusk — until it was too late and they became trapped in sea ice. More than 1,000 died.

The blasting can take a particular toll on a part of the body in invertebrates called the statocyst. In octopuses, squid, lobsters and other invertebrates, the organ is responsible for orientation and balance. Damaged, it disorients the creatures and makes them vulnerable to predators.

Still, while research has expanded in the last decade, much is difficult to pinpoint and sometimes impossible to study. “You can’t study a whale’s hearing,” said Lindy Weilgart, a researcher at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia and the author of an analysis of 115 studies, released in 2018.

The exposure of mammals to such noise has been likened to living in a permanent construction zone. “Sometimes listening on the headphones gives you a headache within 10 minutes,” Molly Patterson, a researcher who studies underwater sound, said in the 2016 documentary “Sonic Sea.” “You have to take the headphones off, you have to turn the volume down. The whales can’t turn the volume down.”

One way many have escaped the cacophony is by heading to the Arctic. But as polar ice melts, and seismic exploration and ship traffic there increase, it is no longer the refuge it once was.

Ocean noise can also have economic repercussions: Research in Norway shows that commercial fishermen return to the dock with 40 to 80 percent fewer fish when exploration is underway nearby.

Regulations on underwater noise are few and far between and experts are searching for solutions. The United Nations recently held a weeklong symposium on noise pollution and marine life.

Voluntary efforts to turn down the volume are having an effect: The Port of Vancouver started the ECHO (Enhancing Cetacean Habitat and Observation) Program, asking mariners to reduce noise by having ships slow down and fix cavitation on the propellers.

At the same time, though, if the Trans Mountain pipeline is built from the tar sands of Alberta to a port near Vancouver, as planned, tanker traffic in the Salish Sea is expected to increase by seven times. Marine biologists say that would exacerbate the difficulties the region’s endangered orcas already face in finding prey.

Scientists and environmentalists are urging that more research be conducted, to learn much more about the effects of sound and ship traffic on the creatures of the sea.

“The effects on marine mammals are felt across an extraordinarily large scale,” Jasny, the marine mammal protection director, said. “And loud noise has an effect on species across the food web.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="80d20a1c-10f7-49cb-8465-ed298fd08009" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/22/science/oceans-whales-noise-offshore-drilling.html">The New York Times</a>.

Oceans are getting louder, posing potential threats to marine life

The seismic air guns probably produce the loudest noise that humans use regularly underwater, and it is about to become far louder in the Atlantic.

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