Word: airgun
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
During its survey, the Langseth had five approved observers on board to watch for marine mammals for 30 minutes before any airgun use. The operation shut down if any were spotted. They used passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) to detect vocalizing marine mammals in times of poor visual clarity. But Rose says that animals are often silent, and some "have high frequency vocalizations, which can only be detected when a PAM system is quite close." In other words, it would be too late to avoid airgun harm. Lee-Ann Ford, president and founder of Hong Kong-based Linking Individuals for Nature...
...nearly four-month tour. The area where the ship was sailing is home to about 34 cetacean species, of which seven are fragile marine-mammal species, like the critically endangered Indo-Pacific humpback dolphin that lives along a 60-mile (100 km) stretch of Taiwan's west coast. "Seismic airguns are very loud, and under certain circumstances they can cause actual physical damage," says Rose. "When a species such as the humpback dolphin is already facing many threats and is hovering on the brink of extinction, adding to their risks by subjecting them to stress from airgun surveys could...
...sciences environmental operations at the NSF. "The risk to people for not pursuing this type of research is simply not part of the story," Lang says. In the past, explosives like dynamite were used to create seismic waves. Improvement of recording devices and computer analysis has further decreased the airgun sound intensity required for geological research. Airguns are "the best existing technology to produce the desired type of sound," he says. Lincoln Hollister, professor of geosciences at Princeton University, also rejects claims that airgun use is correlated with damage to marine life, like lesions to the ears and brains...