Tag Archives: pile driving noise
Bam! Scientists study wind farm construction noise impacts on lobsters… by making big noises
Thirteen feet below the surface of Woods Hole harbor, a lobster shelters under a plastic shield in a wire cage. An experiment is happening: every seven seconds on the dock above, a pile driver pounds a long, steel post deeper into the muddy harbor bottom nearby. The experiment happening here at this dock is designed to replicate, at small scale, the pile driving necessary to construct an offshore wind farm. The goal is to understand how a variety of marine creatures, not only lobsters, but other fish-market-friendly species like scallops, flounder, black sea bass, and squid respond to the noisy, intensive work of building an offshore wind farm. It’s something fishers and regulators are especially interested in. Already, the WHOI team’s earlier studies have shown that squid, which detect sound through vibration, responded dramatically to pile-driving noise — at least, at first. But it’s a different story for scallops, one of the highest value fisheries in the U.S. As soon as scallops were exposed to pile driving noise, they clammed up. Photos, more, >>CLICK TO READ<< 07:59
Whale hell looms in Massachusetts
The first of the monster offshore wind arrays is ready to roll, with construction to begin in May. The acoustic hammering on the whales and other sea critters will now escalate from sonar survey blasting to the incredible noise of pile driving. Each huge wind tower sets on an enormous monopile that has to be driven into the sea floor. The project bears the happy name Vineyard Wind but there is no vineyard. Here is how they put it: “Vineyard Wind is currently building the nation’s first utility-scale offshore wind energy project over 15 miles off the coast of Massachusetts.” There are 62 enormous wind towers, each among the world’s biggest at 13 MW. >click to read< 12:54
Exposure to pile driving noise associated with construction of docks, piers, offshore wind farms, cause squid to exhibit strong alarm behaviors
“This study is the first to report behavioral effects of pile driving noise on any cephalopod, a group including squid, cuttlefish, and octopuses,” says lead author Ian Jones, a student in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology-Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Joint Program in Oceanography. Jones and his colleagues in the Sensory Ecology and Bioacoustics Lab at WHOI exposed longfin squid (Doryteuthis pealeii) to pile driving sounds originally recorded near the construction site of the Block Island Wind Farm in Rhode Island. >click to read< 11:52
