Supreme Court hears case about Navy sonar and whales
The Supreme Court appeared split Wednesday on whether environmental laws can be used to stop the use of sonar off the coast of Southern California, which environmentalists say is adversely impacting marine mammals' quality of life, even to the point of death.
The Times' David Savage reports:
Savage reports that the sonar emits a powerful sound wave in the water -- as "if we had a jet engine in this courtroom and you multiplied that noise by 2,000 times," said Los Angeles lawyer Richard B. Kendall, who represented the environmentalists.
Kendall said beaked whales, in panic, dive deeply to escape the sound, and they sometimes suffer bleeding and even death when they try to resurface. He also cited the Navy's own estimate that 170,000 dolphins and other marine mammals would flee the sonar.
The whale pictured here in 2002 offers a similar argument, when a beaked whale washed ashore in the Canary Islands after a military exercise involving sonar. Scientific tests pointed to undersea noise from naval maneuvers by Spain and other NATO countries as the likely cause of the mass stranding, the Associated Press reported.
--Francisco Vara-Orta
Photo: Juan Medina / Associated Press
