There's more to resolve than hydrocarbon traps in the world's oceans as governments get serious about protecting marine mammals.

Ironic, isn't it, that the growth of the oil industry ultimately put the whaling industry out of business, probably saving several species from extinction in the process.

Now the same industry that came to their aid in the late 19th century is under scrutiny for possibly causing harm to them in the early 21st century. And governments around the world are scratching their elected and appointed heads, trying to figure out how to appease the biologists, the environmentalists, the oil and gas industry and, somehow, the whales.

One of the key issues is noise. Whales use sound as one of their primary means of communication, and their senses of hearing are extraordinarily important as a result. Offshore operations such as geophysical surveys, which use airguns to provide a seismic source, are not exactly quiet. Does the repeated sound of an airgun cause physical harm such permanent hearing loss or some sort of unnecessary stress that might have a long-term effect on the whales' ability to thrive? Nobody knows. But the fear of such possible damage is causing host governments to look very seriously at, and in some cases start implementing, a variety of regulations that could have a significant negative impact on the marine geophysical contracting industry and, by extension, the offshore exploration and production (E&P) industry.

Fear of the unknown

As governments struggle to enact new legislation and regulations, trends are beginning to surface that indicate just how difficult this problem might become for the industry. One major problem is the fear, believed to be unfounded, that seismic activity kills marine mammals and fish.

In Canada, for instance, one recent permit request was met with a recommendation that the contractor provide visual monitoring along the shoreline and that a "stranding response team" be put in place. Chip Gill, president of the International Association of Geophysical Contractors (IAGC), commented, "This is problematic on so many levels that it's hard to even address. Firstly, while it's not unreasonable to assume that our activities might temporarily change their behavior or temporarily displace them, there is no evidence that we cause physical harm to marine mammals. Secondly, to do this type of observation would require aerial surveys. Putting people in the air to monitor this activity is dangerous, and to require people to be in harm's way like that for what appears to be an emotional, knee-jerk reaction without any scientific basis really makes one wonder what these people are thinking."

In Brazil, meanwhile, the fishing industry has gotten in on the act after a large fish kill was attributed to a seismic survey. Gill said there's no evidence that seismic surveys ever kill large numbers of fish, and in this particular case the currents were flowing in the opposite direction from the direction they would have been flowing if the seismic survey was the cause. It's more likely, he contends, that some sort of industrial discharge was the culprit. Yet an allegation was made and legal action brought by the fishermen, causing scrutiny of the entire regulatory regime.

"The Brazilian authorities had previously told us that some of the things they were considering were coming from pressure from external groups," Gill said. "When we saw the reasoning they put in writing, the logic was absent in many cases. It was very eye-opening."

Where's the dictionary?

Governments that acknowledge that seismic activity doesn't lead to the death of the animals are then faced with the difficulty of determining what other effects it might have. This has led to a host of ill-defined terms intended to protect the animals from harm. Terms like "incidental take," "biological significance" and "precautionary principles" litter the verbiage, but debates between contending parties on what those terms mean has been long and loud.

An incidental take happens when whales are close enough to be affected by an airgun or other noise-making device. The United States is drafting regulation that would allow for incidental take authorization, meaning that there is an understanding that a certain amount of interactions between marine mammals and E&P operations is inevitable and, if regulated and kept to a minimum, is authorized.

But to what extent is this interaction considered somewhat harmful to the animals? Gill said any form of harassment is considered to be a take but that "harassment" is another murky term that, in its most extreme form, could be something as simple as a seal turning its head to look at a diver who's just surfaced in the bay. "If you take that extreme position, which some members of the environmental community would have regulators do, then every seismic pulse is a take on every animal that can hear it," Gill said.

This leads to the second term, biological significance. Seismic operations have not been shown to kill or injure animals in any significant, visible way (although some would argue that certain stranding events have been the result of Navy sonar activity in the area). So any effect on the animals is behavioral and is much more difficult to discern.

The IAGC has correlated seismic activity with studies on sperm whale activity in the Gulf of Mexico conducted by Oregon State University. The correlations show few overlaps between areas in which tagged whales have been spotted and areas where active surveys are being shot, and the few instances where whales were present in the area don't offer much conclusive evidence that the whales are bothered by the noise. But Gill said that biologists might argue that any whale that leaves the area in which a survey is being shot might have to swim some distance to find the next available food source, causing that animal stress and possibly affecting its ability to survive a hostile situation such as a hurricane.

"There's quite a bit of argument for 'when in doubt, assume the worst,'" Gill said. "We're in a difficult position because we're having to prove the negative."

Biological significance ties in with precautionary principles, meaning that in the absence of factual research, solid precautions should be taken. "We should be precautionary out of deference to the animals, but arguably not if our activities are not biologically significant," Gill said.

Whale watching

The UK has responded to concerns about marine mammals by recommending that seismic vessels monitor the presence and activity of the animals while the survey is in progress. This should be done, regulators suggest, through visual observation as well as passive acoustic monitoring.
While putting another acoustic monitoring device on a seismic vessel would seem to make sense, Gill said there are problems with the systems. For one thing, they only hear animals that are vocalizing. "It works pretty well for sperm whales, which are kind of the poster children for passive acoustic monitoring," he said. "It doesn't work so well for other species who rarely if ever vocalize."

The systems also aren't particularly accurate, meaning that a whale could be beyond the exclusion zone defined by the regulations yet still appear to be within close range. Detecting the animal's actual location is hampered by left-right ambiguity as well.

Finally, there's a financial issue. Towing the monitors as separate instruments is hazardous to the streamers and airgun arrays that are already trailing the vessel since they can become tangled in the gear. And incorporating them into the streamers themselves will reduce the channel count available for the seismic survey.

"There's an expense associated with that, and development would have to happen," Gill said. "The streamers are engineered to transmit the subsurface data, without leaving room for much else. We're not really in a financial position to develop these systems."
Research projects like the whale tagging in the Gulf of Mexico continue, and it is hoped that more research will lead to more realistic regulations. Meanwhile, the IAGC and other organizations continue to argue their case.

"It's hard to see why this effort is being pushed," Gill said. "If we're worried about the health and well-being of marine mammals, we should start with things that we know harm them - fishing, for instance.
"We have to be engaged in bringing some of our intellectual and scientific knowledge to bear on the process - out of self-defense, if nothing else."

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