Passive Acoustic Monitoring of the Environmental Impact of Oil Exploration on Marine Mammals in the Gulf of Mexico.

The Gulf of Mexico is a region densely populated by marine mammals that must adapt to living in a highly active industrial environment. This paper presents a new approach to quantifying the anthropogenic impact on the marine mammal population. The results for sperm and beaked whales of a case study of regional population dynamics trends after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, derived from passive acoustic-monitoring data gathered before and after the spill in the vicinity of the accident, are presented.

Assessing the Deepwater Horizon oil spill impact on marine mammal population through acoustics: endangered sperm whales.

Long-term monitoring of endangered species abundance based on acoustic recordings has not yet been pursued. This paper reports the first attempt to use multi-year passive acoustic data to study the impact of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill on the population of endangered sperm whales. Prior to the spill the Littoral Acoustic Demonstration Center (LADC) collected acoustic recordings near the spill site in 2007. These baseline data now provide a unique opportunity to better understand how the oil spill affected marine mammals in the Gulf of Mexico. In September 2010, LADC redeployed recording buoys at previously used locations 9, 25, and 50 miles away from the incident site. A statistical methodology that provides point and interval estimates of the abundance of the sperm whale population at the two nearest sites is presented. A comparison of the 2007 and the 2010 recordings shows a decrease in acoustic activity and abundance of sperm whales at the 9-mile site by a factor of 2, whereas acoustic activity and abundance at the 25-mile site has clearly increased. This indicates that some sperm whales may have relocated farther away from the spill. Follow-up experiments will be important for understanding long-term impact.

Three-dimensional seismic array characterization study: experiment and modeling.

In the summer of 2003, the Littoral Acoustic Demonstration Center conducted an acoustic characterization experiment for a 21-element marine seismic exploration airgun array of total volume of 0.0588 m(3) (3590 in.(3)). Two Environmental Acoustic Recording System buoys, one with a desensitized hydrophone, were deployed at a depth of 758 m in a water depth of 990 m, near Green's Canyon in the Gulf of Mexico. Shots over a grid were recorded and calibrated to produce absolute broadband (up to 25 kHz) pressure-time dependencies for a wide range of offsets and arrival angles in the water column. Experimental data are analyzed to obtain maximum received zero-to-peak pressure levels, maximum received sound exposure levels, and pressure levels in 13-octave frequency bands for each shot. Experimental data are quantitatively modeled by using an upgraded version of an underwater acoustic propagation model and seismic source modeling packages for a variety of ranges and arrival angles. Experimental and modeled data show good agreement in absolute pressure amplitudes and frequency interference patterns for frequencies up to 1000 Hz. The analysis is important for investigating the potential impact on marine mammals and fish and predicting the exposure levels for newly planned seismic surveys in other geographic areas.