A lot of those early mathematicians were a bit on the crazy side, having come to that realization and not having any of the framework for coping with the idea.

Well, they could have just invented a god of mathematics and had done with it. But they were pretty smart cookies, so they'd probably have noticed the stupidity of admitting a supernatural explanation of any sort into their attempts to understand the natural world.

Your analogy is wrong. You need to cut the top off the safe and then perform the rest of your experiment.

Air guns (they've never been called "sonic cannons" ; the author has been channelling early Hawkwind) are fired at a depth of 5~10m below water level, suspended from floats towed behind the survey boat. Normally there's a string of multiple hydrophones trailing along behind the air gun, held at a similar depth by tension between floats (pulling them up) and a hydroplane (underwater wing) pulling them down. Sometimes we lower a hydrophone (or several, for redundancy) into an existing well bore and lower it to the bottom, maybe as much as 7 or 8 km away from the surface, but we never lower air guns to that depth because they wouldn't work.

Understand, I am pro oil drilling, pro nuclear power... and all sorts of other things you likely find unsavory. But this just seems wanton to me. I'm not a monster or an idiot... and this seems like madness.

Then TFA's writer has achieved his (her? I forget which) purpose of spreading FUD about what has been a routine technique in other parts of the world for decades, with appropriate mitigation strategies in place.

Sharktopusnado, I'm afraid.

Agreed. There are other forms of diving injury that whales (and other non-human air-breathing divers) suffer from, but they're generally chronic and cumulative. Crush injuries to bones with isolated fluid-filled cavities which can't equilibrate fast enough, for example. Humans get the same, which is part of the reason that sat divers take several days to get to depth.

The sound is so excruciating that whales will surface too fast and get the bends

Whales don't get "the bends" (in the sense of decompression sickness). When they dive, they stop breathing (Doh!) and the air in their lungs rapidly compresses until their lungs have collapsed and the air is in the (relatively non-absorbent) bronchae and cranial air passages. Then, when they come back up, there isn't the excess of nitrogen dissolved in the blood that needs to exsolve and forms the bubbles that cause decompression sickness.

What gives human divers decompression sickness is that we breathe air while we're at depth. That allows our bloodstream to equilibrate with an effectively unlimited supply of nitrogen at depth, whereas the whales (dolphins, seals, penguins, etc) have only the one pair of lungs full of air to equilibrate against.

Don't worry, you're by no means the first person to get this wrong. I've had to talk other trained SCUBA divers through the maths before.

There are other forms of diving injury to which whales etc are subject, but they're not "the bends." And while they leave marks on the bones (as they do on human divers too), they're not enough to incapacitate the animals (though they can destroy a commercial diver's career).

Without the oil that came from the fracking boom oil would probably be at $150/barrel or higher

The overwhelming majority of the "fracking boom" is drilling for gas, not oil. Yes, it is possible to frack shale (as in the gas boom) for oil, but it's much, much less common than fracking for gas.

Of course, in conventional (i.e. non-shale) reservoirs, hydraulic fracturing to enhance oil (and gas, but more rarely) production has been going on since the 1950s without arousing any particular attention. Of the about 200 wells on my CV, dozens of them have probably been fracked since I drilled and steered them. I wouldn't know ; it's not a question I'd ever waste my time asking.

I'd think it obvious that an air cannon isn't going to produce sound levels equivalent to an atomic bomb.

Considering that air guns are powered by air compressors typically driven by diesel engines consuming a couple of gallons per hour, the average power isn't that high. The peak power is higher, because the guns fire in pulses, using the air as a storage medium.

The oscillating bubbles created by air cannons are practically microscopic by comparison.

For seismic analysis, particularly for differentiating between oil-filled rock, gas-filled rock and water-filled rock, we need lots of high frequencies in the projected sound, so that we can measure the difference of absorption at different frequencies. To get those high frequencies, we need bubbles of relatively small size. That constrains the power we can put into the water. Producing bigger guns will produce more power, but will not answer our geological questions, and so would be a waste of money. We'd have to run multiple surveys (big guns versus small guns) across the same area, almost certainly causing more harm than doing one survey.

See my comment up-thread. TFA is ill-informed and written to generate FUD, not to inform people. These aren't new techniques, and procedures for mitigating the effect of seismic air guns on sea life - particularly cetaceans - are well-known and used throughout the industry.

But in the absence of being able to issue warnings in "dolphin language"

The "cetacean communication experiments which were stopped were ones attempting to teach dolphins (I forget the species, but only one species) to speak English. Work to understand the communications of cetaceans continues to this day.

Your "dolphin language" phrase implies that you think there is one "dolphin language" ; what we're pretty sure of is that there is one language per species ; there are 40 "dolphin" species in 17 genera (closely related groups), and about the same number of other cetaceans. We're pretty sure that some species have multiple, geographically constrained languages - "dialects" if you will. So your "dolphin language" suggestion implies learning to speak something like 100 distinct dialects, some probably very distantly related to others.

Big task.

See my comment up-thread.

You don't know the procedures that have been followed for years. I first approached my Boss about getting qualified as an MMO in about 2005, but he couldn't see a business case for it - I don't have the time in my regular employment to spend 1/2 hour doing nothing but sweeping the horizon with binos.

Shame - I'd have liked to get paid for a week of going whale-watching.

Those figures sound broadly comparable to regulations that I've seen controlling the exposure of diving workers to loud noises in their work place (pneumatic tools, stand-off distances from explosive cutters, that sort of thing). I didn't memorise the details as I didn't need them, but those figures sound broadly comparable.

There's no point to sitting in one area and pulsing the same place over and over.

There is - if you're doing "Seismic While Drilling". You can bump up the signal to noise ratio at your hydrophone 5, 6, or 7 kilometres below the seabed, without having to use huge air gun arrays (the compressors and air banks for which take up a lot of deck space ; deck space is always at a premium).

However, TFA is about shooting area-wide seismic coverage, not SWD. Because of the turning circle of (say) a 5km long, 16-wide array of streamed hydrophones, you keep them in constant motion. If you didn't, the hydrophones will get displaced from their required relative positions. Positioning typically needs to be precise to tens of centimetres. (Yes, many companies use (D-)GPS to confirm the positioning of the hydrophones, and record those positions for every shot.)

I mean, people have been detonating underwater *atomic bombs* - how do you think that compares to the sound of a pop of air?

Just to put this into perspective : the air guns are suspended over the side of the drilling vessel about 20m from the side of the vessel ; if they're streamed behind a seismic boat, they're in the order of 100m behind the boat.

Shocking as it may seem, we don't design equipment that will damage our other equipment. Which is why the energy released from air guns is considerably lower than (for example) that released by a depth charge or a torpedo.

Can they give "warning shots" for some time period ahead of time to clear the area?

We call them "mitigation shots".

I don't know American regulations, but Norwegian regulations require a visual observer ("MMO", Marine Mammal Observer) to scan for cetaceans (whales, dolphins) by day and an acoustic monitor ("PAM", Passive Acoustic Monitor) to be deployed for at least 30 minutes before starting the guns. If a cetacean is spotted within a kilometre of the air guns (why they're using the name "sonic cannon" except to drum up FUD, I don't know), or an acoustic detection is made, then a start up sequence of one shot every 30 seconds, ramping from zero power to operating power over 30 minutes. The specific aim is to alert the cetaceans to something noisy happening, and to impel them to move away.

(I don't have a qualification to operate as an MMO, but I have to work with them on almost every exploration well that I drill, and I am absolutely flat-out no-questions-asked required by my employer's to comply with the MMO's recommendations. Here is a list of the exceptions : [LIST BEGINS][LIST ENDS] ; list length 0 bytes. Can I be less ambiguous about this?)

This is NOT new technology. The mitigation procedures are NOT new. TFA is pure FUD.