Now, the Navy wants to conduct sonar exercises nearby North Atlantic right whale critical habitat. From Florida Today, FL:

Navy subs could one day play war games about 60 miles off Jacksonville, with sonic pings that environmental groups fear might ring a death knell for the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale.

“At the closest ranges, it can actually lead to internal bleeding in the brain and ears,” Zak Smith, attorney with Natural Resources Defense Council, said of the 300 planned sonar devices.

That, in turn, could result in damage to the giant mammals’ ability to navigate, increasing the risk of beaching and death as they migrate and calve along Florida’s east coast — including the Space Coast — primarily in January and February.

The estimated $100 million Undersea Warfare Training Range would be about 660 square miles, and includes the path that right whales take on their annual trek from New England to bear young in the warmer waters from Georgia to Sebastian Inlet.

Military officials say they need the range to prepare for hunting foreign subs. Environmental groups say run-ins with right whales would be unavoidable and that the range could go elsewhere, far from such prime calving grounds.

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Navy officials said the area off Jacksonville is ideal for training sailors to hunt quiet, hard-to-detect diesel subs, given its similar shallow waters — 120 to 900 feet deep — as the South China and Arabian seas.

The Navy would line the ocean floor with a network of undersea cables and up to 300 sonar devices that can transmit and receive sounds.

The mid-frequency sonar can reach 235 decibels, as loud as a space shuttle blasting off, although sound travels differently underwater and is far less damaging.

Environmentalists say these types of sonar systems have been involved in several mass marine mammal die-offs in the past.

Beyond causing potentially fatal inner ear damage, sonar can inhibit the whale’s ability to communicate, masking calls from potential mates and separating calves from mothers. It also can cause chronic stress and lower rates of reproduction.

The two systems, known as SQS-53 and SQS-56, emit sound up to 235 decibels, approaching levels used by the Navy during an exercise in the Bahamas in 2000 suspected of causing 16 whales to beach themselves.

An environmental impact study by the Navy, released in September, concluded that the proposed testing range would be far enough away from right whales’ typical traveling routes that the sonar shouldn’t cause any long-term harm, and collisions with vessels could be avoided.

Give them an inch, and they’ll take a mile: Winter v. NRDC or the whale case, which was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2008, “is best read as the latest articulation of the Supreme Court’s belief that military readiness activities are ’special’ when it comes to forced compliance with the federal environmental laws.” From the NRDC:

“The Supreme Court held that the lower courts did not properly balance the competing interests at stake, and struck down two significant safeguards that reduce harm to whales from high-intensity sonar training,” said Joel Reynolds, senior attorney and director of NRDC’s marine mammal program. “The decision places marine mammals at greater risk of serious and needless harm. However it is a narrow ruling that leaves in place four of the injunction’s six safeguards. It is significant that the court did not overturn the underlying determination that the Navy likely violated the law by failing to prepare an environmental impact statement.”

“It is gratifying that the court did not accept the Navy’s expansive claims of executive power, and that two thirds of the injunction remains intact,” said Richard Kendall, NRDC co-counsel.

The Navy acknowledges that sonar can be deadly to marine mammals, and that the exercises at issue would “take” an estimated 170,000 marine mammals, including causing permanent injury to more than 500 whales and temporary deafness to at least 8,000 whales.

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