The U.S Department of the Interior (DOI) has started the exploration of oil and gas in the Atlantic coast on Thursday amidst warnings that it may kill many marine species.
After months of campaigns against the undersea seismic survey plans for fear that intense sound of exploration could take away lives and hurt several marine mammals, the federal department decided to act on it.
"There's no argument that some of these sounds can harm animals, but it's blown out of proportion. It's the Flipper syndrome or 'Free Willy,'" said Arthur N. Popper, head of the University of Maryland's laboratory of aquatic bioacoustics, in an interview with the New York Times.
The effect of the intense sound on the marine mammals' behavior in the long term has become a much greater concern for scientists.
However, on the 788-page assessment released on Thursday, DOI explained that they have considered many worst-case scenarios and ignore measures applied by humans and the marine mammals to avoid accidents.
"It is quite unlikely that most sounds, in realistic scenarios, will directly cause injury or mortality to marine mammals," said Brandon Southall, in an e-mail to the New York Times. "Most of the issues now really have to do with what are the sublethal effects -- what are the changes in behavior that may happen."
Once a formal decision is granted in favor of the exploration, the seismic surveys would reopen a swath from Delaware to Cape Canaveral, Fla., which has been shut to petroleum exploration since the early 1980s.
When the undersea seismic started decades ago, the petroleum industry has already sunk 51 wells in the East Coast, but, none of them was successful enough to begin production.
However, after numerous failures to find an oil-rich or gas-rich spot, the DOI remained positive. In 2011, it announced that about 3.3 billion barrels of recoverable oil and about 312 trillion cubic feet of natural gas can be somewhere in the new exploration area.
As of posting, nine companies have already applied for permits to start exploration. But, actual drilling of possible oil or gas wells will begin after the White House ban on the production in the Atlantic coast expires in 2017, and after the government agrees to lease ocean tracts to oil companies.
