The Navy's Low Frequency Active Sonar Web Page is accessible here.

In response to the initial outcry of environmentalist concerns, the Navy has agreed to prepare an environmental impact statement in order to inform environmentalists and the public of any danger which their project would pose to marine species.

As is always the case with politics, this statement is no simple matter. The amount of research which had already been done on the effects of low frequency sound on marine life was actually quite limited. As such, the Navy took upon itself the task of conducting research on the topic itself.

It is worthwhile here to question the Navy's motives. The low frequency active sonar system has apparently been in development since the early or mid 1980's, and during most of that development little attention was paid to environmentalists' concerns. With environmental testing finally going on now, the Navy is under a great deal of pressure to produce results which reflect favorably on the system on which it has already spent a great deal of taxpayers' money. It is therefore perhaps difficult to believe that their research has been completely objective.

Additionally, environmentalists have voiced concerns that the research the Navy was to conduct was itself being designed in an unsafe manner and would very likely cause disturbances to marine populations itself -- without actual deployment of the low frequency active sonar system.

Despite these outcries, the Navy went through a great deal of bureaucracy and eventually obtained permission to conduct their tests.

These tests were formulated and were conducted by the Navy in conjunction with a number of civilian scientists with backgrounds in marine biology and in the physics of sound. They were designed with the safety of marine life close in mind and involved close observation of marine life in their normal settings (so that their normal behavior, without the nearby use of low frequency active sonar, could be determined) and then while low frequency sound was being projected at them. Marine experts were kept on hand during the experiments in order to make sure that, if the whales displayed any potentially harmful variation from their normal behavior when the research was going on, sound projects would stop immediately.

The tests having recently been completed (in early April of 1998), the Navy is now currently continuing in the preparation of its environmental impact statement.

An interesting point to bring up here is that there is some dispute over what the actual results of this research were. According to the Navy (see their web site), no serious detrimental effect on marine life was observed by the experts they had on hand. Some other organizations (for example, the one that publishes this web site) claim that harmful effects were observed by Hawaiian locals at the vacinity of the research site and that the Navy dismissed these observationists as meaningless since they did not come from scientific sources.

One has to question, then, whether the Navy's scientists also actually made similar observationists (which were "hushed up") or whether the locals which made the observations were indeed underqualified as scientists and made incorrect observations.