Battleangel

Put together with other environmental concerns, it becomes clear that military operations worldwide do incalculable damage to the biosphere. And it’s not just depleted uranium, spent shells, blast craters or oil spills either. Sometimes the damage is far more subtle, yet every bit as grievous.

CNN - Environmentalists sued the Navy on Wednesday, claiming that a widely used form of sonar for detecting enemy submarines disturbs and sometimes kills whales and dolphins.

The sonar “is capable of flooding thousands of square miles of ocean with dangerous levels of noise pollution,” according to the lawsuit filed in federal court in Los Angeles.

The Navy settled a similar lawsuit two years ago by agreeing to limit the peacetime use of experimental low-frequency sonar.

The environmentalists want the Navy to use harmless passive sonar — listening for sounds made by marine mammals themselves — to locate the animals before using mid-frequency sonar.

They also want the Navy to avoid migration and calving areas and to turn on sonar systems gradually so that the animals have time to flee.