Gordon Hastie, SMRU: Noise from pile driving during offshore wind turbine construction could be damaging the hearing of harbour seals around the UK, researchers have found. They say more research is needed on how noise affects marine mammals’ hearing and into engineering solutions to reduce noise levels. The study is published today in the British Ecological Society’s Journal of Applied Ecology.

There are currently 1,184 offshore wind turbines around the coast of the UK, between them generating around 4GW of power. The next round of construction, which began in 2014, will see hundreds more turbines installed to generate a further 31GW, yet we know little about the impact of construction noise on sea mammals’ hearing.

The team of ecologists from the University of St Andrews attached GPS data loggers to 24 harbour seals while offshore wind turbines were being installed in the Wash in 2012. The data loggers collected information on the seals’ locations and their diving behaviour, relaying the information onshore via the mobile phone network.

They then combined this data with information from the wind farm developers on when pile driving was taking place to produce models which predicted the noise each seal was exposed to, and compared this with noise levels that other studies show cause auditory damage.

The model revealed that half of the tagged seals were exposed to noise levels that exceeded hearing damage thresholds. To read more go to:

https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/news/archive/2015/title,257140,en.php