Obama: Approves Whale Killing Sonar!

Obama Administration to Whales: You Go Deaf, We'll Get Oil

Imagine this: Someone moves into your neighborhood and then, every 10 seconds, proceeds to fire off an airgun that's louder than a jet engine. It goes on for weeks or months at a time. Some of your neighbors go deaf; others perish.

If you're a whale, dolphin or sea turtle living off the Atlantic Coast, the Obama administration has made that nightmare a reality. The U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management just opened up offshore waters from Delaware to Florida to oil and gas exploration and approved a controversial technique for conducting seismic surveys: blasting ultra-loud noise guns that send sound waves through the water to help find oil and gas.

The guns generate incredibly loud sounds that reach more than 250 decibels (a jet engine's around 140 decibels). That level of noise causes hearing loss and even death in marine mammals like whales and dolphins; it disrupts whole underwater webs of life.

The government has acknowledged that these noise blasts will hurt as many as 138,000 marine mammals, including some of Earth's last remaining Atlantic right whales (of which only about 500 remain in the wild). Stay tuned for how you can help.

Read more in this Huffington Post op-ed by the Center for Biological Diversity's Miyoko Sakashita.