Essay on Submarine and Sonar

Submitted By Bubblegumpixie
Words: 644
Pages: 3

My initial reaction to the articles we read was of questioning towards the military. I am a firm believer in putting animals needs right next to ours, not after. When I learned how these animals, specifically the whales, dolphins, and porpoises, were being affected by the sonar, I was disturbed. My first thoughts were, "How could anyone in their right mind, one, hurt and kill helpless animals using this technology, and two, continue to use the technology that is killing these animals in the first place?" Now, I have never used sonar, nor have I ever fully understood the entire complexity of sonar, but even I know that if something is hurting/killing people, animals, or anything, that there should not be a legitimate reason to continue the practice! I do realize that the military, according to them, have perfectly legitimate reasons for using this sonar. But to me, all I'm interpreting is that they are aware that their practice is hurting animals, yet that is not an important enough problem for them to care. Now, I'm not saying that the military doesn't care about animals, but what I am saying is that there must be some way for us to put funds into research for something other than sonar. I did ask a couple questions about using infrared rays to detect the thermal energy of beings in the water, but I remembered that light doesn't travel well in water. However, if the right amount of light/heat is produced/emitted from the submarine, I feel as though this infrared detection could work. However, there would definitely be a large blind spot for the people in the submarine. So, I suggested that if we used low frequency sonar to detect objects farther out from the submarine, that would let us find enemy objects in the water, and the low frequency wouldn't disturb the marine life. I also had another idea. What if we researched the marine life in the Puget Sound (just as a trial for the experiment) and recorded their sound that alerted their other mammals to clear out? Think about it. If there was a certain clicking sound the dolphins used and is known to signal the phrase "need to scatter" or something similar, we could play this recording when the submarines detect the marine life. This way, the animals would hear "from one of their own" that they needed to evacuate. Then the submarines wouldn't have