Wind Turbines: First It Was Birds And Bats, Now Possibly Seals | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's note: The author of this post is Dr. Roy Cordato, who is Vice President for Research and resident scholar for the John Locke Foundation.


    It is well known that industrial wind turbines are a danger to large birds of prey like bald eagles, and bats. Indeed, the death and destruction that these massive propellers in the sky have been causing has led the Audubon society to give then the nickname "bird Cuisinarts."

    Now the Wildlife Society is reporting on a new study from the Journal of Applied Ecology, which has found that the noise from wind turbine construction offshore could be affecting the hearing of seal populations. WildlifeSociety.org quotes the lead author of the study, Gordon Hastie, as saying that "These are some of the most powerful man-made sounds produced underwater, noise capable of travelling large distances underwater." They also note that "researchers took data from previous studies on seals and other species that predicted what levels of noise would cause reductions in the sensitivity of the seals' hearing. "It is important to highlight that there is a cumulative effect of sound," [Hastie] said, adding that the longer animals are exposed to loud sounds, the higher the risk of hearing damage.

    Clearly the authors view their work as preliminary. Again quoting Hastie:



    The 2015 ozone season began on April 1 and, as I have been doing since this newsletter was started, each week during the ozone season this newsletter will report how many, if any, high ozone days have been experienced throughout the state during the previous week, where they were experienced, and how many have been recorded during the entire season to date. (Note: ground level ozone, which is what we are reporting on, is often called "smog.") According to current EPA standards, a region or county experiences a high ozone day if a monitor in that area registers the amount of ozone in the air as 76 parts per billion (ppb) or greater. The official ozone season will end on October 31. All reported data is preliminary and issued by the North Carolina Division of Air Quality, which is part of the state's Department of Environment and Natural Resources. Thus far this season there have been no high ozone days recorded on any of the state's 42 monitors.

    The table below shows all of the North Carolina's ozone monitors and the high reading on those monitors for each day of the 7-day period, June 1-7.