A couple of weeks ago, FaceBook shut down the public information channel used by the organizers and subscribers of the “No Kings” rally exactly at the time it was needed most. This happened in the midst of Starlink being throttled back for Ukraine just as they came under attack by Russia.

Now that it has been made clear that Facebook and Starlink are making National and International policy decisions without public input, we need to use them (or not use them) accordingly. People were killed in Ukraine due to the Starlink debacle. Whoever made the decision to limit our allies’ use of this privatized technology should be tried for murder.

We should also consider transferring the management of Starlink technology over to NASA. NASA has been one of the most trusted US agencies ever. Their development of electronics technologies and computers was handed over to the public (because we paid for it), and these technologies became the launching pad for a number entire industries – including semiconductors, information processing, computers, and solar power conversion.

This was the part of America that we were all proud of.

As far as Meta is concerned, it has been clear to me that they have a pretty tight hand in how the public gets, delivers, and engages in public discourse. Discussions that don’t harmonize with the Meta algorhythms languish or get buried; ones that do “go viral.” It is not our choice, it is Meta’s.

OCR ran afoul of this last year. Until August 2025 we had over 900,000 followers on FaceBook. We had more public engagement than Oceana and Ocean Conservancy combined. This allowed us to get our policy messages and scientific discussions out to the world. And due to being an “influencer,” we also picked up anywhere from $250 to $1,000 a month just for views. (I lay this spectacular success at the feet of Daniela, our VP of Communications.)

But then, through a nasty bit of legerdemain, we were attacked, and all our followers were vaporized. We tried many Meta channels to try to get them restored. They definitely have this information because one of their obvious products is “eyes on screens.” But we have gotten nowhere with them after over a year of trying to get our feed restored.

Recently BlueHost (our mail server and website host) started offering assisted and “free run” AI services. We signed up with them ages ago as a reliable website host, and mail relay. Now they have tools to mess with our stuff. I’m not really interested in reading 50 pages of 6pt. type to find out where they are granting themselves use-permission to all our material; and these data contracts are also non-negotiable. You either say “I agree” or you don’t get the service.

Then there are some other very useful fundraising services which would only be available to us if we transfer our email hosting services over to Google. If I had anything to worry about with BlueHost and our information security, swinging over to Google would just blow that worry out of the water.

We have other curious evidence of communication interference – like communications being delayed for days or not getting delivered, and of course most of us know when one of our ‘digital services’ pops out ambiguous warnings from the Dark Web about our “Cloud services being terminated unless we change our password…” The digital age has spawned lots of hazards.

If I wanted to create a useful business in this digital age, I might come up with a very simple, very secure way of signaling other people, like a “digital bell” that I could “ring” for messages like “one if by land, two if by sea,” or any other particular message which we could agree on when in we’re face-to-face.

Or how about homing pigeons?

The post Are secure communications becoming out of reach? appeared first on Ocean Noise.

Gaslighting has become one of the main staples of the current US Executive Administration. The term comes from a stage play “Gas Light” by British Playwright Patrick Hamilton whereby a husband denies his wife’s perceptions of real things, causing her to question her sanity.  It has come to mean that if you unabashedly tell a lie so frequently, the target of the gaslighting starts caving in by asking themselves “Am I crazy?” It is particularly effective if the gas-lighter blames the target of doing the things that the gas-lighter is actually doing.

While this has been a socially performative strategy imposed by this Administration, it is now coming up in the naming of Congressional and Senatorial Bills. “The Big Beautiful Bill Act” is a prime example, inasmuch as it did nothing to serve and protect the government’s constituents (that would be you and me), and everything to serve the business interests that our government is supposed to protect us from.

I bring this up because there is currently a Bill up with a name that gaslights in spades – S-5653, called the “Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act,” or BAAJA for short. Primary Sponsor Sen. Shelley Moore Capito [R-WV] and co-sponsors Sen. Mike Lee [R-UT], Sen. Martin Heinrich [D-NM], and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse [D-RI].

I have no idea what Sen. Whitehouse is thinking, as this seems so contrary to his usual arc of reasoning. There’s some speculation that he might welcome BAAJAs inclusion of provisions that require energy-intensive data centers to pay their fair share of associated transmission and grid upgrade costs. Or perhaps he sees it as a leg-up on future clean energy projects (if and when his party captures the Government “trifecta” – holding the House, the Senate, and the Presidency). But the sacrifices are particularly deep for this sort of speculation.

Some of the provisions in the Bill include eviscerating the Clean Water Act (CWA), the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA), the Endangered Species Act (ESA), and the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) by establishing the position that all of these Acts interfere with business, and that what is harmed as any proposed action or policy moves forward are the industries that are proposing the action.

It prevents courts from staying any action while the action is in litigation (an inducement to drag litigation on, and on, and on…). It allows businesses to sue the taxpayers for the full construction costs under a set of arbitrary conditions perceived as harm to that business. It would limit proposed alternatives in Environmental Impact Statements to only those that serve the business – eliminating the “No Action” alternative under NEPA, and potentially exempts Deep Sea Mining projects outside of Federal Waters from NEPA review.

What this has to do with American Jobs and an “Affordability” is out of the reach of my logic…If passed, this Bill will set our conservation efforts and environmental protection laws back sixty years – to when the policy was “What’s good for business is good for America” (…anybody remember the occasional Cuyahoga River fires?)              

I’m not sharing with you just to bum you out, because you can do something – which is to call your Senators and tell them how crappy this Act is.

The Center for Biological Diversity put together a good Fact Sheet, and a good set of Talking Points.

You can call one of your Senator’s offices; their Washington DC office, their local office near you (where you are more likely to get a person on the line), or the DC Senate Switchboard (202) 224-3121), where they will route you to your Senator’s office.

You might also want to write a note to Sheldon Whitehouse’s office with your opinions about this disastrous bill.

The post Regulatory variation on the gaslighting theme. appeared first on Ocean Noise.

(Photo links to a good article on Deep Sea Mining)

Last July we submitted our comments on the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s (BOEM) Request For Information and Interest on Commercial Leasing for Outer Continental Shelf Minerals Offshore American Samoa – along with 76,443 other people. These titrated down to 8,971 original comments (because some misguided eNGOs use these comment opportunities as a proxy for a petition). But of all the nearly 9,000 original comments, only a handful were in support of the mining proposition; most notably from Impossible Metals, Inc., who requested the action in the first place, and a few other industrial actors who stand to profit from their pillaging our planet.

In our newsletter on the proposal, we provide an overview of the problem. The comments we submitted are a lot more detailed. But the gist is that it is a really crappy idea to submit millions of ocean-acres to silt fallout from dredging up polymetallic nodules just so a small handful of people can get really rich.

We’ve submitted comments to eight Environmental Impact Statements (EIS) since this Administration has taken office (the most we’ve ever submitted in this short time frame). The protocol under the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) is that the agencies will submit Draft EIS when proposing a project, policy, or activity that will have impacts on US Assets – assets that essentially “belong” to the American People.

We are given some amount of time review and submit our comments. The Agency is then supposed to synthesize all the public concerns and publish a Final EIS addressing and representing the concerns expressed in our comments. But with this Administration we have seen no evidence of the Final EIS stage. So their issuing a Draft EIS is just window dressing. They are just going to do what their funders want them to do anyway.

This is all bad. But with this Deep Sea Mining, the impacts will be extremely far reaching. And because we know so little about deep pelagic and benthic biota and their habitats, we have no baseline to understand how profoundly this will be changing our planet – until we find out the hard way.

The post They’re going to do it anyway… appeared first on Ocean Noise.

Described in the bullet points below*

The post International definitions of “Hearing” and “Sounding” appeared first on Ocean Noise.

Top: California Sea lion hears in at least three ways
Below: Snapping Shrimp cavitation bubble – one of the more ubiquitous natural sounds in coastal waters

The post International definitions of “Hearing” and “Sounding” appeared first on Ocean Noise.

Top: Proposed mining area
Below: Virginia offshore current complex

The current administration is proposing yet another reckless way of grinding up our planet and turning it into money.

Earlier this year the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM, soon to be Minerals Management Administration or ‘MMA’) received an unsolicited “Request for Information and Interest (RFI) about the possibility of seafloor mining off the coast of Virginia. The requesting company – which remains unnamed, set up a process whereby BOEM will open up 1,769,196 acres (2,764 square miles) of the continental shelf off Virginia for the extraction of Titanium, Zirconium, and Monzonite – rare earth metals used in microchip manufacturing, as well as phosphorites and phosphates, which can be used as soil amendments in industrial agriculture.

The subject area is foundational to the trophic pyramid that makes this area so rich in marine and estuarian life. Immediately adjacent to the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay and flanking the crenellated coast that makes the Virginia coast so popular for recreational fishermen, and so profitable to commercial fishing operations.

As I mention in our comments, this area is not just a minerals library, it is habitat. The mining process involves the use of hopper dredges reaching down from the surface, and heavy seafloor excavation equipment which breaks and scoops up enormous amounts of benthic sediment.  This will kick up vast amounts of silt and sediment, in an area of dynamic currents and adjacent to the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) (also known as the Gulf Stream).

Silt caught in the AMOC will be carried into the Atlantic, sullying the entire water column, and raining down in the benthic sessile metazoan epifauna which don’t really have mechanisms of shedding this non-organic silt. So this little industrial extraction operation will be despoiling potentially millions of acres of the Atlantic seafloor and the water column above it.

Our comments can be found here: https://bit.ly/3SP8j6a

I wish I had sent this newsletter out earlier, because the comment period ended on Saturday August 22 at 11:59 EDT.

It will be interesting (or terrifying)  to see what the Agency will do with these, as I perused the 1600+ comments submitted, and it doesn’t seem like anybody thinks this is a good idea.

The post Proposed seabed mining off the Virginia coast appeared first on Ocean Noise.

Global communications fiber could be used in “Digital Acoustical Sensing

Day 4 of the OCEANOISE conference focused on the themes of “Soundscapes,” “Explosives,” and “Sonar.” Much of the day spend on Soundscapes, with the first Session, and all of the “5-minute talks” and poster sessions on Soundscapes. But before I dive into Soundscapes, the other two sessions warrant some comments.

Most folks in the US are unaware of the “Unexploded Ordnance” (UXO) problem found off the coasts of Western Europe.  There are thousands of bombs from 2kg. to 200kg. that were dropped in the water during WWII. They were dropped because planes carrying bombs that were not used on targets could not land with them, for fear that if the landing failed, the bombs would damage or destroy the airfield. So when returning with unused bombs, pilots would just drop them in the sea. But now, as human enterprises move offshore, all of these bombs pose a hazard. This is particularly exacerbated with the development of offshore windfarms. And of course just blowing them all up just defers the damage left over from the war – with heavy consequences on marine life.

A joint project by Loughborough University, the UK National Physics Lab, and Arhaus University has developed a “deflagration” protocol whereby a hole is drilled into the bombs, and the contents are set on fire, significantly stretching out the time that the explosive energy of the content is released. This can decrease the noise level by 20dB (1/100th of the noise) thereby significantly decreasing the acoustical damage to sea animals and their habitat.

And of course most of us would not be here without the sonar issue that came up on everyone’s screens 25 years ago, when a mass-stranding occurred while there were public hearings in the US about “Navy sonar.”

The term “Soundscape” was first introduced back in 1977 by Canadian composer R.Murray Schafer with his seminal book “The Soundscape: Our sonic environment and the tuning of the world.” Schafer couches his argument in the toxicity of chaotic sound environments from a human perceptual standpoint. But the term has since become useful in evaluating other bioacoustic settings – particularly in the sea, where it is much easier to identify things by hearing them than seeing them. The challenge is to decipher what all the sounds mean.

The inquiries were focused on instrumentation, metrics, and interpretation. Marine life density can express itself through biological sound complexity, and how industrial noise can compromise it. Coral reef recordings are being used to encourage reef animals to recruit into compromised reef areas, and elephant seals fitted with sound recorders are diving down and bringing back soundscape recordings from 1000 meters deep.

Another unfolding soundscape instrument technology is “Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS),” which uses the distortions wrought on fiber-optic signals from ocean sounds that impinge on them. Unlike hydrophones, which pick up sounds to a single point, fiber-optic cables can pick up sounds along the entire length. Ths means that entire ocean basin soundscapes can be accessed and modeled – within the 5kHz-and-below bandwidth of the DAS technology.

This will go far in understanding the dynamics of the soundscapes throughout the sea.

The post Field Report from OCEANOISE 2026 – Day 4 appeared first on Ocean Noise.

Bow-wave riding Dolphin

It was on the third day of the OCEANOISE conference that things started to gel. The themes and loose ends of the previous days began convening on the session topics – which were “Riverine and Coastal,” “Management and Policy,” and “Seismic.” Like water, all of the so many different ideas and flavors began flowing together.

All of the relevant terms – “exposure,” “static and dynamic thresholds,” “level of onset of biological effects” (LOBE), and the distinctions between quantity and quality of noise impositions – are all becoming the common vocabulary we all speak when talking about ocean noise. This included people in conservation, regulation, research, academics, and industry.

The utility of this is clear; having a common vocabulary facilitates action between all stakeholders. When those making the noise and those concerned about the noise are speaking in common terms, the regulatory thresholds become less ambiguous.

What has been problematic about the “simple threshold” regulatory regime is that those thresholds don’t apply universally to all animals. The classic example is when dolphins were found surfing the bow-waves of seismic survey vessels – clearly being “overexposed” to human-generated noise. This highlighted the need for a more nuanced set of guidelines that Southall et al 2007 derived, identifying marine mammals into four sets of frequency-defined hearing regimes. (This was further nuanced and included in subsequent revisions of the Marine Mammal Protection Act.)

On Wednesday, Erica Staaterman with the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) introduced a four-tiered system of evaluating various seismic survey technologies based on  criteria that include amplitude, impulsivity, and another metric that includes net energy exposure over 60 seconds. This accommodates what we all know about seismic survey technologies and its various impacts on marine fauna. It also recognizes what used to be generically called “seismic survey blasting” by the conservation community, into gradations of ‘seismic signals’ that accommodate the impacts on marine life in consideration of the needs of industry, suggesting monitoring guidelines that reflect conservation concerns.

This has been facilitated by all ocean noise stakeholders hewing toward a commonly understood vocabulary (and it has only taken 30 years!)

The post Field Report from OCEANOISE 2026 Day 3 appeared first on Ocean Noise.

Zooplankton Mandala

Day two of the OCEANOISE-2026 conference was every bit as rich as Day 1. The “sessions” were “Polar,” “Sensitivity and Pathology,” and “Behavior.”

“Polar” largely examined the complex assumptions we make about things like masking, and the limits of noise exposures for critters living in a habitat that can be extremely noisy on account of bubbles releasing from horizons of seasonal melting ice; ice plates ripping and crashing into each other over miles of interface, and glaciers collapsing into the sea – and what this all means in the arctic as shipping lanes replace the disappearing polar ice as it subsumes to climate change.

The other two sessions examined how marine fauna reacts and responds to human-generated noise – which is different than the natural cacophony of a healthy ocean. There was an interesting, if mildly terrifying presentation on how various taxa of zooplankton respond to the noise of windfarms. These critters are the base of the trophic pyramid – so their relative densities have bearing on all taxa feeding above them.

It turns out that windfarm noise is harmful to some species, but advantageous to others, disrupting the natural density balance that has been established over the last few billion years. What this means as the zooplankton ‘travel up the food chain’ can only be speculated.

We are seeing a variation of this disruption theme in the natural history of the gray whales. These animals feed on amphipods and other benthic invertebrates in the arctic. These benthic invertebrates feed on the “snow” of phytoplankton that falls down from the polar ice cover above. As the polar ice retracts, the phytoplankton don’t have a place to grow, pulling the plug on this important food chain. This is resulting in the crashing of the gray whale population.

What other trophic disruptions await as the noise of human enterprise expands further and deeper into the ocean?

The post Field Report from OCEANOISE 2026 Day 2 appeared first on Ocean Noise.

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