BY Earth Justice
Today, a coalition of conservation groups (the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Gulf Restoration Network, the Center for Biological Diversity, and the Sierra Club) announce a major settlement agreement with the Department of the Interior and oil and gas industry representatives, to protect whales and dolphins in the Gulf of Mexico from high-intensity airgun surveys. The settlement requires new safeguards, including putting biologically important areas off-limits, expanding protections to additional at-risk species, and requiring the use of listening detection devices to better ensure surveys do not injure endangered sperm whales. The agreement was filed in the case of NRDC v. Jewell, in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana.
“Today’s agreement is a landmark for marine mammal protection in the Gulf,” said Michael Jasny, Director of NRDC’s Marine Mammal Protection Project. “For years this problem has languished, even as the threat posed by the industry’s widespread, disruptive activity has become clearer and clearer.”
To search for oil and gas, the industry typically uses arrays of high-powered airguns that release intense blasts of compressed air into the water every 10–12 seconds, for weeks or months at a time. The noise they produce is almost as intense as dynamite, which airguns replaced in the mid-1950s. Each year industry routinely conducts dozens of “seismic” exploration surveys in the northern Gulf, one of the most highly prospected bodies of water on the planet.
