A federal judge Thursday prohibited the U.S. Navy from combing the world's oceans with a powerful new sonar, ruling that the booming sounds meant to detect enemy submarines could cause irreparable harm to whales.
The temporary injunction bans a type of low-frequency sonar that has not been conclusively linked to marine mammal mortality.
Although the ruling could allow the Navy to resume using the sonar in some places, U.S. Magistrate Elizabeth D. LaPorte imposed a worldwide ban until Navy brass and environmental experts can agree on a list of spots where sailors can deploy the sonar without harming marine life.
In her 58-page opinion, the judge, who is based in San Francisco, agreed with the Navy that even a temporary peacetime ban on the low-frequency sonar system could hamper military preparedness.
She gave the Navy and environmental groups that filed the lawsuit until Nov. 7 to report back to her with an interim solution.
The Navy and federal marine fisheries officials declined immediate comment.
But environmental groups were elated by the preliminary injunction. They had sued to overturn a Bush administration decision in July that gave the Navy permission to "harass" or injure whales in training missions using the sonar designed to search for super-quiet diesel submarines.
"There was no justification for giving the Navy a blank check to operate this sonar in 75% of the world's oceans," said Joel Reynolds, an attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council. If allowed to continue, he said, the sonar system would have "threatened marine life on a staggering and unprecedented geographic scale."
Thursday's ruling is the latest legal victory for environmental groups trying to rein in powerful sonar and other loud sounds that science is increasingly linking to deaths and injuries of marine mammals.
The Bush administration is pushing to exempt military activities from a variety of environmental constraints. In September, a federal judge rejected arguments that sonar use in the deep ocean was exempt from the National Environmental Policy Act.
In early 2000, 16 beaked whales beached themselves in the Bahamas in a mass stranding that the Navy and other authorities have linked to bursts of midfrequency sonar. A similar mass die-off of whales occurred in September in the Canary Islands, following naval operations by warships from the United States and nearly a dozen NATO allies.
