Professor Proves Offshore Wind Kills Whales

It's all sciency, with graphs and maps. At Climate Change Dispatch, Professor Makes Stunning Discovery: ‘Absolutely, 100 percent, Offshore Wind Kills Whales’

For the best part of half a century, a 41-foot humpback whale named Luna swam up and down the East Coast. Then on Jan. 30, 2023, Luna washed up dead on Long Island, New
York. He was the tenth whale to strand on beaches in New York and New Jersey in nine weeks. Environmentalists, politicians, and ordinary citizens loudly wondered if the construction of offshore wind turbines was killing them.

Apostolos Gerasoulis, a Rutgers professor emeritus of computer science who co-created the search engine that powers Ask.com, now says the answer is yes. ‘Absolutely, 100 percent, offshore wind kills whales,’ he says.

Early in 2023, Gerasoulis began researching whale deaths. That summer he started building a software system to identify any relationship between the dead whales and offshore wind survey vessels, which use loud blasts of sonar to map the seabed for the installation of offshore wind turbines and high-voltage cables. He named the system Luna.

 

But the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which is responsible for protecting marine animals and their habitats insists there is no connection. ‘To date, no whale mortality has been attributed to offshore wind activities,’ said Lauren Gaches, NOAA Fisheries public affairs director shortly after Luna’s body was found.

Whale deaths had started increasing several years earlier. NOAA declared ‘unusual mortality events’ for humpback whales in 2016, minke whales in 2017, and North Atlantic right whales also in 2017. The death count is now up to 534 for these species. Wind farm developers started sending out sonar vessels to blast the ocean floor with high-intensity sound waves to map it for offshore wind farms in 2016. But NOAA still denies any connection.‘At this point, there is no scientific evidence that noise resulting from offshore wind site characterization surveys or pile driving could potentially cause whale deaths,’ Katie Wagner, NOAA public affairs specialist, told DailyMail.com. ‘There are no known links between large whale deaths and ongoing offshore wind activities.’

However, according to Gerasoulis, NOAA data reveal that humpback whale deaths in New York, New Jersey, and Rhode Island waters went from an average of two per year before 2016 to 10 in the years since. Last year, 21 humpback whales died in the region. ‘You have 20 dead whales. You used to have two, and now it’s 20,’ Gerasoulis said. ‘So I started looking at this from every perspective.’

He loaded NOAA data on whale deaths, the zigzag courses of survey ships, and even wave action into his computer system. Luna revealed patterns that Gerasoulis believes point to offshore wind survey vessels as the cause of the whale deaths. Gerasoulis is an expert in computational sciences, search engines, high-performance computing, and data analytics. ‘There are five people in the world who build search engines,’ Gerasoulis says. ‘I’m one of them.’

 

Last year he founded Save the East Coast to investigate the impact of offshore wind on oceans, marine life, fishermen, and shore communities. The Luna software system that Gerasoulis built integrates NOAA data on whale, dolphin, and porpoise deaths with vessel traffic data from MarineCadastre.gov. He believes it is the first system of its kind. Luna generates maps of the U.S. East Coast and plots the locations of offshore wind farms; the deaths of whales, dolphins, and porpoises; and the routes taken by various survey ships. Luna can display any specific geographic area, time frame, marine mammal species, or ship, depending on the query.

For example, from 2017 through 2023, a total of 286 whales, dolphins, and porpoises died along the New Jersey and New York shores. Luna shows exactly where they were found.

FWIW, I'm still not convinced the various offshore wind activities are killing whales, but I'm also not convinced it's not. It's a difficult question to prove definitively, with the test subjects so big, rare and valuable, and the environment they dwell in unconducive to controlled experimentation.