4. “The bends”: Under pressure, nitrogen in the lung air’s oxygen-nitrogen mix is absorbed at greater than normal concentrations into the diver’s blood and tissue. The longer a diver remains at depth, the more gradually he needs to ascend to normal atmospheric pressure to allow the nitrogen to reabsorb into the lungs. If he surfaces too quickly, the nitrogen expands and forms bubbles—in much the way that a can of soda forms bubbles when you open it, quickly reducing the pressure inside. The nitrogen bubbles that form in tissue during rapid ascent cause extreme pain in the joints. If a bubble in the blood travels to the brain, it can paralyze or even kill you.
5. The deepest-diving military submarines—the Soviet Alfa-class submarines, constructed at extraordinary expense out of titanium alloy during the height of the Cold War—reached crush depth at 3,700 feet meters. Cuvier’s beaked whales have been measured to dive to almost 1,000 feet.
6. There were multiple aerial sightings of warships in Bahamian waters from March 16–18, including by neighbors of Balcomb’s in Northwest Providence Channel near Grand Bahama on March 16 and by Balcomb in Tongue of the Ocean on March 18th. For a precise linear narrative of the stranding and its aftermath, see Balcomb and Claridge’s peer-reviewed and published report: K. C. Balcomb and D. E. Claridge, “A Mass Stranding of Cetaceans Caused by Naval Sonar in the Bahamas,” Bahamas Journal of Science 8, no. 2 (May 2001): 4–6.
Chapter 4: The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Beachcomber
1. John Dominis’ photographs of humpback whales appeared in the August 2, 1963, issue of Life magazine, pp. 38–45.
2. Balcomb, and the newspaper-reading public, later found out that the Smithsonian and Army bird-banding project was a $3 million classified program funded by the Army’s Chemical and Biological Warfare Division in Fort Detrick, Maryland. The Army wanted to study the birds’ migratory patterns and range to determine if (1) migratory birds might inadvertently spread biological and germ warfare agents from test sites in the Pacific to populations on the mainland, and (2) these same birds might be deployed as an “avian vector of disease” to intentionally deliver biological weapons to targets across borders. When first confronted with rumors of such a collaboration with the Army in 1969, the leadership of the Smithsonian vehemently denied any involvement. But when documentary evidence came to light in 1985, the Smithsonian vowed to never again accept contracts for classified military research. See also P. M. Boffey, “Biological Warfare: Is the Smithsonian Really a ‘Cover’?” Science 163, no. 3869 (February 21, 1969): 791–96; Ted Gup, “Pacific Gulls Doubled as War Hawks,” Washington Post, May 20, 1985, A1.
Chapter 5: In the Silent Service
1. Radar, developed in the 1930s at the US Naval Research Lab to target and track surface ships and aircraft, uses echolocation by bouncing radio waves, rather than sound waves, off of objects. In addition to finding submarines once they had surfaced, radar could also detect a snorkel or periscope that penetrated the surface to breathe air or scan for ships. It wasn’t until WWII that the term “sonar” was coined (for sound navigation ranging) to parallel the naming of radar (radio detecting and ranging).
2. According to Norman Polmar, “The Soviet Navy: How Many Submarines?” Proceedings 124, no. 2 (February 1998): 1, www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1998-02/soviet-navy-how-many-submarines, from 1945 through 1991, the Soviet Union produced 727 submarines—492 with diesel-electric or closed-cycle propulsion and 235 with nuclear propulsion. This compares with the US total of 212 submarines—43 with diesel propulsion (22 from World War II programs) and 169 nuclear submarines (including the diminutive NR-1). Not included are Soviet midget submarines and the single US midget, the X-1 (USS X-1).
3. In one of the odd coincidences of scientific exploration, a Russian acoustician named Leonid Brekhovskikh made a virtually simultaneous and independent discovery of the deep sound channel during wartime explosive experiments in the Sea of Japan. But because of the secrecy of Soviet and American acoustic research, these WWII allies and Cold War adversaries wouldn’t learn of each other’s discoveries for many decades.
4. Ewing’s pilot rescue system was ingenious. The downed pilot would drop a hollow metal sphere from his floating dinghy into the ocean. It would sink and eventually implode at the increased water pressure at 3,000 feet, sending a low-frequency sound signal through the deep sound channel to two or more bottom-mounted receivers connected by cable to coastal listening stations thousands of miles away. Once the pilot’s position was triangulated, rescue aircraft could be dispatched from the nearest carrier in the Pacific.
5. For most of the Cold War, SOSUS represented the only way a woman could claim warfare experience and compete with her male counterparts on a nearly equal basis. Before the early 1980s, when women began being assigned to surface ships and were accepted into flight training, SOSUS was an opportunity for women who wanted to serve in an operational role in the US Navy. Female line officers started being assigned to the SOSUS stations in 1970 when Norah Anderson joined the listening station on Eleuthera and became the first woman to take a place on the operations floor.
See also Gary Weir, “The American Sound Surveillance System: Using the Ocean to Hunt Soviet Submarines, 1950–1961,” International Journal of Naval History 5, no. 2 (August 2006): 12–18. According to naval historian Weir, “Since the Navy classified SOSUS activity as a warfare specialty, the door opened for hundreds of women to a Navy career outside of medicine, education, or administration.”
6. The following concise description of the two types of military submarines appears on the US Navy’s website (www.navy.mil/navydata/cno/n87/faq.html): “Attack submarines (designated SSN and commonly called fast attacks) are designed to pursue and attack enemy submarines and surface ships using torpedoes. They also carry cruise missiles with conventional high-explosive warheads to attack enemy shore facilities. Fast attack submarines launched cruise missiles against targets in Iraq during Operation Desert Storm and targets in Serbia during the conflict in Kosovo. They also conduct intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions, mine laying and support special operations.
“Fleet ballistic missile submarines (designated as ‘SSBNs’) carry long-range nuclear warhead missiles. They roam the ocean avoiding contact with other submarines and surface ships. The ability of the fleet ballistic missile submarine to survive a nuclear attack against the United States made them the most credible nuclear deterrent during the Cold War . . . A US Navy fleet ballistic missile submarine carries 24 Trident ballistic missiles. Each missile carries several nuclear Multiple Independently-targetable Re-entry Vehicles (MIRVs).”
7. The Soviets had their own network of underwater listening stations, but theirs was much less extensive and much more primitive than SOSUS. Balcomb reports that SOSUS operators in the late 1960s were aware of a Low Frequency Active sound system that the Soviets used to mask the sounds of their submarines and create clutter in the acoustic environment.
8. The Silent World (Le Monde du Silence), co-directed by Cousteau and a young Louis Malle, won the 1956 Academy Award for Best Documentary and the Palme d’Or at the 1956 Cannes Film Festival. Shot aboard the ship Calypso, it was one of the first color films to use underwater photography.
9. The highly classified nature of Navy-funded acoustic research was a chronic source of friction between ONR and the top scientific talent it recruited. Like all academics, acousticians wanted to publish their research in peer-reviewed journals. If they couldn’t publish—or could publish only heavily redacted versions of their research—researchers viewed Navy work as a lot less attractive, regardless of the steady funding stream. So in the 1950s, the Navy decided to create its own in-house, peer-reviewed journal. Published under the auspices of the Navy’s Underwater Sound Advisory Group, the Journal of Underwater Acoustics became the most prestigious publication in its field. The fact that its distribution was limited to the 150 scientists with high security clearances only added to its elitism and cachet.
10. Back in 197
0, Roger Payne—who would later popularize humpback whale songs—published the first scientific paper to identify the risk that ocean noise pollution posed to baleen whales. In his largely speculative article, Payne and co-author Doug Webb estimated the progressive impact of industrial shipping, oil and gas drilling, and other ambient noise on the ability of baleen whales to communicate with one another. Payne hypothesized that baleen whales depended on the deep sound channel to communicate with mates across entire ocean basins, and that industrial noise pollution was drastically reducing the range of those mating calls—a phenomenon he called masking. At the time, Payne’s theory of long-distance communication among whales was roundly derided by marine acousticians as patently implausible. Almost a quarter century later, his protégé Chris Clark, using SOSUS arrays as part of Whales ’93—an ONR program designed to afford select civilian bioacousticians access to SOSUS’ listening technology for marine mammal research—confirmed that the deep sound channel was in fact a great whale party line. See R. Payne and D. Webb, “Orientation by Means of Long Range Acoustic Signaling in Baleen Whales,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 188 (December 1971): 110–41.
Chapter 6: The Stranding Goes Viral
1. Hal Whitehead’s lab at Dalhousie University in Halifax has been studying the biology of the northern bottlenose whales in the Gully, a submarine canyon off Nova Scotia, since the 1980s.
Chapter 7: “Unusual Mortality Event”
1. M. P. Simmonds and L. F. Lopez-Jurado, “Whales and the Military,” Nature 351 (June 6, 1991): 448.
2. A. Frantzis, “Does Acoustic Testing Strand Whales?” Nature 392 (March 5, 1998): 29.
3. SACLANT Undersea Research Centre, Summary Record, La Spezia, Italy, 15–17 June 1998, SACLANTCEN Bioacoustics Panel, SACLANTCEN M-133 (La Spezia, Italy: NATO, 1998).
Chapter 8: The Lone Rangers of the Environment
1. Mothers for Peace, which had formed in the late 1960s to protest the Vietnam War, got involved in the fight against Diablo Canyon in 1974, when it learned of a nearby fault line that hadn’t been accounted for in the plant design. The organization petitioned the United States Atomic Energy Commission and remained involved in the legal challenges against licensing the plant.
Chapter 10: The Whale Coroner Arrives
1. Sam Guinness, an heir to the Guinness beer fortune, was a local seaplane pilot and friend of Ken Balcomb’s.
2. To view a remarkable gallery of images from Darlene Ketten’s Computerized Scanning and Imaging Facility at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, go to: http://csi.whoi.edu/.
The other leading researcher working with CT and other imaging technology to illuminate the morphology of toothed whales is Ted Cranford, PhD, a biologist at San Diego State University. His gallery of sperm whale head images is at www.whalescience.com.
Chapter 11: Depth Charges
1. To see what an actual ship shock explosive test looks like, watch the video clip of the 1995 mine explosive test of the USS Osprey at www.youtube.com/watch?v=plAAuk9VwLs.
2. At the age of 32, Maris Sidenstecker was already a seasoned veteran of the whale wars. (She shares the same first and last names with her mother, who is also a whale conservationist.) Back in 1976, Maris had become the youngest crusader in the burgeoning whale preservation movement. At the age of 14, using her $50 savings account, she designed and printed a simple T-shirt with a blue fluke emerging from the words “Save the Whales.” Maris began selling the T-shirts through Rolling Stone magazine and at animal rights conferences, and then used the proceeds to educate the public about the plight of endangered whales. When the media picked up on her grassroots campaign, donations increased dramatically, and she established the Save the Whales foundation to educate schoolchildren about whale habitats and conservation.
3. NRDC v. U.S. Department of the Navy, 857 F. Supp. 734, 737–38 (C.D. Cal. 1994).
Chapter 13: Cease and Desist
1. Before deploying overseas, every carrier strike group must be certified battle ready in two war-game exercises: Composite Training Exercises (COMPTUEX) and Joint Task Force Exercises (JTFEX). COMPTUEX, normally conducted for two to three weeks six months before deployment, is built around a final battle problem that brings together all the specialty groups that have trained separately up till then. JTFEX requires naval and nonnaval forces to integrate assets and accomplish missions in a multithreat, multidimensional environment.
2. Jim MacEachern was the acoustician who directed ONR’s Littoral Warfare sea tests in the Bahamas.
3. Listings of national navies that currently or formerly deploy submarines are maintained by the magazine IHS Jane’s Defence Weekly, www.janes.com/defence.
Chapter 14: Acoustic Storm
1. Project Artemis featured an enormous WWII tanker, the Mission Capistrano, which ONR anchored offshore from the Naval Air Station in Bermuda. A 400-ton array of transducers—1,440 individual transducers weighing 200 pounds apiece—descended five stories deep through the hull of the ship and transmitted at 400 hertz with a source level of 247 decibels. A passive array of receivers, composed of ten strings of hydrophones was mounted underwater on 200 80-foot towers. Those towers were connected by cable to an enormous oil-rig tower that was mounted on an extinct underwater volcano in 220 feet of water. The tower rose 70 feet above the ocean surface and was capped by a two-story structure that accommodated 20 technicians. Viewed from underwater, Artemis resembled nothing so much as the mammoth walls of amplifiers and loudspeakers that were to become the hallmarks of outdoor rock concerts.
The problem with Artemis—a problem inherited by LFA a decade later—was how to filter out the echo of ordinary background noise in the ocean. The primitive state of signal processing technology in the early 1960s severely limited the Navy’s ability to distinguish objects hundreds of miles from the sound source. But at least the Navy established to its satisfaction that it could build a sonic sonar blaster when the need arose.
2. John Walker Jr. was a US Navy warrant officer and career submarine communications expert who, over a period of 15 years, sold countless naval messages and the keys to decipher them to the Soviets, thus revealing a vast amount of highly sensitive information about US naval operations and capabilities. Later Walker recruited another Navy communications specialist, Jerry Whitworth, his brother, Arthur, and even his own son, Michael Walker, before he was turned in by his wife. The men were arrested in 1985 and subsequently prosecuted, but by then, enormous damage to US security had occurred.
3. Predicting ocean waves and the storms that drive them has vexed military planners since the beginnings of maritime warfare. Julius Caesar’s miscalculation of surf conditions during his first failed invasion of Britain in 55 BC cost him two full fleets. As a native of the nontidal Mediterranean, he was unprepared when high tide at Dover beach swamped his warships. And in 1281, Yuan Dynasty founder Kublai Khan’s invasion of Japan was doomed by a cataclysmic typhoon. The unforeseen kami kaze, or divine wind, as the Japanese later called it, overwhelmed and sank the Mongol armada of 4,400 ships and the 100,000 soldiers aboard.
4. Munk’s mentor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and his partner in his wave-prediction research was oceanographer and Arctic explorer Harald Ulrik Sverdrup, who emigrated from Norway in 1936 to become the third director of Scripps. Because of their foreign birth, both Sverdrup and Munk were under constant surveillance by the FBI throughout the first half of the war. Sverdrup’s security clearance was revoked for a period, and after the war, he decided to leave Scripps and return to Norway.
5. Munk’s “wind-driven gyres” derived from his observations and calculations of what he called “microscale disturbances” on the surface of the ocean: the glitter of sun that outlined the slope and fetch of ripples. Without ripples, he realized, the ocean surface would be a glassy plane, impervious to atmospheric weather. Munk’s epiphany was perceiving that ripples created traction between the ocean and the air above, and that the action of the wind against this rippled la
yer—the wind’s velocity, multiplied by the slope of millions upon millions of ripples—created sufficient force to drive the circulatory system of the world’s oceans. Munk’s wind-driven gyres revolutionized the macroview of ocean circulation. Prior generations of marine scientists perceived the oceans as essentially static bodies of water with ebbing and flowing tides tugging at their edges. It wasn’t until the Spanish explorer Ponce de León observed the Gulf Stream’s northeasterly current along the coast of the New World in the early sixteenth century that anyone noticed what Ben Franklin later called “the river in the ocean.” Munk was the first person to trace the interlocking “rivers” of wind-driven gyres across the hemispheres and the world’s oceans.
6. After the Soviets launched Sputnik on October 4, 1957, a small group of university-based physicists set out to close the Soviet missile gap. John Wheeler, a Princeton physicist and one of the architects of the hydrogen bomb test on Enewetak, conceived a top-secret summer study group composed of academics who would consult to the military on missile detection and related security issues. The original faculty was composed of an elite corps of less than two dozen physicists from Princeton, MIT, Harvard, Berkeley, and CalTech, many of whom had worked on the Manhattan Project as graduate students. They called themselves the Jasons.
War of the Whales: A True Story Page 43