mobanmarketWhen the Obama administration announced earlier this month that it was reversing its plans to open the mid- and south-Atlantic to oil and gas drilling, environmental groups cheered.
But, as a new set of maps from ocean conservation group Oceana shows, “entire marine communities” in those waters from Delaware to Florida are still under threat.
That’s because fossil fuel exploration using seismic airgun blasting—a process known to cause harm to marine life—is still a possibility. Currently, as ThinkProgress reported,
Despite the testing’s expenses and the administration’s reversal, “none of the companies that have sought the seismic permits have withdrawn their applications to the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management yet,” Tideland News reported.
Here’s how the process works: In order to find fossil fuel deposits beneath the ocean floors, the “airguns are towed behind ships and shoot loud blasts of compressed air through the water that travel miles into the seabed, which reflect back information about buried oil and gas deposits,” Oceana explains. The blasts are “repeated every ten seconds, 24 hours a day, for days to weeks at a time.”
The Center for Biological Diversity describes the blasting as “actually a blunt-force weapon,” as it emits “the loudest human sounds in the ocean, short of those made by explosives.”
Oceana’s new maps show that the areas covered in the pending applications to do the seismic testing include areas critical to threatened or endangered species, like the loggerhead turtle and North Atlantic right whale, in addition to being necessary for commercial and recreational fish stocks.
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