Comment Re:Hoping this is not as bad as it sounds (Score 4, Informative) 272
286 db at source? Air cannons are 250 db at source, so 3 and a half orders of magnitude less powerful. Lightning in the ocean is 260 db at source and your average square kilometer of ocean gets two strikes per year. These ships will be covering tens of millions of square kilometers. With a pulse rate of once every 10 seconds (3.2 million pulses per year per ship, if they run constantly, which they almost certainly won't), you're looking at an order of magnitude less per ship than lightning (and I doubt there will be many ships, and they won't always be in operation). And lightning striking water is an order of magnitude louder. It even causes shock waves in the water by the same mechanism - rapidly creating an air bubble in the water (in lightning's case, by boiling the water) which then oscillates as it implodes and explodes repeatedly.
Now, one could say that this is different because it's all in one place at a given time, and thus animals would be tempted to flee instead of it being a one-off thing. But then again, lightning strikes aren't spread out evenly over space and time either, they come in thunderstorms which do the exact same thing, repeatedly hitting the same section of sea for hours at a time.
I'm not saying that I think these ships are harmless - not at all. I just think that I think people are overplaying it when they make these apocalyptic pronouncements on what effect they'll have on sea life. I mean, people have been detonating underwater *atomic bombs* - how do you think that compares to the sound of a pop of air? At 400 feet, a blue whale's own calls (188db @ 1m) are louder than the air gun.