To create its training range, the Navy plans to wire about 622 square miles (1,715 square kilometers) of an offshore sea shelf with sensors and cables that will feed data to a nearby base in Mayport.
This system will allow the Navy to track every movement as ships work with helicopters and P-3 Orion aircraft—a roughly 11-person maritime-patrol turboprob used in anti-submarine warfare—to locate, track, and "destroy" target submarines using nonexplosive torpedoes and other ordinance.
Post-mission 3-D models will then "give a blow-by-blow reconstruction of what they did right, what they did wrong, what they can do to improve," said Jene Nissen, a former Navy sub-hunter who now manages the organization's environmental acoustics.
The Florida location is ideal for the range, Nissen said, because it's a perfect place to teach sailors to find even quiet diesel subs in shallow, near-shore waters filled with noise from ship traffic, waves, and wildlife.
The site is also close to the home bases of the ships and aircraft involved in these training exercises.
Building the range at one of the other possible sites would have meant incurring big expenses by putting vehicles, parts, and personnel on the road for extended periods of time.
It would also have meant that sailors who are already away from home for much of the year would have seen their families even less than they will when working off Jacksonville.
"For 21 years my focus was chasing submarines, and it's probably the hardest thing the Navy has to do," Nissen said.
"We owe it to our sailors to make their training as effective as possible before we send them overseas and put them in harm's way. And that's what this range is going to do."
Even One Death Can Spell Catastrophe
But critics say that building the range near Jacksonville will have ships steaming in from bases in Mayport and Kings Bay, Georgia—cutting right through the whale calving grounds.
The nursery is especially vital to the species, since its population is so small, conservationists say.
Once decimated by hunting, the animals' greatest threats today are ship-whale collisions and entanglement in fishing gear or other ocean debris.
Whale biologists stress that even a single death, particularly that of a female capable of bearing young, might put the survival of the species at significantly greater risk.
The Navy says its training grounds won't increase ship traffic, because naval ships already pass through these waters. Officials add that Navy vessels already take extensive precautions to avoid whale strikes.
But ship collisions aren't the only threats the range might create.
The site's waters will also be filled with some level of unrecoverable training debris, including sub-hunting "sonobuoys" dropped from aircraft and parachute gear that could pose entanglement problems for whales.
The impacts of sonar use are another concern. While the Navy won't use sonar within the nearby calving grounds, the technology is critical for hunting subs at the training site.
Even so, such sounds travel far underwater, and it's still unclear what adverse effects they may have on whales and their calves. (Related: "U.S. Navy Wins Dispute Over Sonar, Whales.")
Jumping to Conclusions?
During the range's five-year construction period, the Navy plans to conduct a series of further surveys to assess the presence and movements of right whales in the region.
But critics note that the Navy has already decided to spend a hundred million dollars just to build the range. At that cost, the site will surely be put to use once it's done, so the time for surveys is before construction begins, the critics say.
And right now there's not enough information to reliably say whether the range will pose a threat to the whales, said Amy Knowlton, a right-whale research scientist at the New England Aquarium in Boston.
"My feeling is that the Navy is pushing this through without any sort of effort to understand how this habitat might be used by right whales and other marine animals," Knowlton said.
The biologist also questioned how the fisheries service could have gotten enough data to reach the opinion that the survival of North Atlantic right whales is unlikely to be put in jeopardy. "They've basically only done one partial season of surveys during right whale calving season," even though several years would be needed to get the full picture, she said.
"Without that scientific effort, the Navy is making a huge assumption that they will build it and it won't be a problem. I wouldn't want to make that assumption."
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