When people meander past the docks at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution’s campus between Eel Pond and Little Harbor, Aran Mooney said, he imagines they must think they’re witnessing the world’s worst construction project as one pile — a vertical, column-like structure — gets hammered into the seabed, pulled out, and then hammered back in. The constant thunderous noise has been on repeat each September for the past couple of years.
The steel-on-steel repetitive clang reverberating around the small coastal village is not a construction project, but actually a study on the effect that anthropogenic, or human-made, noise may have on marine animals — in particular, the impacts of constructing massive wind turbines offshore.
In the past half-decade, Mooney, scientist and acoustician at the Oceanographic Institution, also known as WHOI, along with a team of researchers, have simulated the construction work required to install foundations for turbines, and have mapped the impacts that one of the most intense sounds has on the marine environment.
“We just want to figure out the best ways to develop renewable energy sustainably,” Mooney said, in between the clang of steel-on-steel on a recent sunny September day.
The main goal for the team is to see which species are impacted by the construction of offshore wind farms and which ones are not; should there be impacts, the study could help identify ways to mitigate adverse effects and protect marine life. Some of its research so far has raised concerns, particularly for scallops.
The noise is loud enough that the team of scientists and construction workers from WS Shultz Co., a marine construction team from Falmouth that physically drives the pile into the seafloor, wear headphones or earplugs. Though disturbingly loud above water, noise actually travels five times faster and farther under water, and even faster and farther in the ground, which is why they now mostly focus on benthic, or seabed, species, Mooney said.
And the sound is a scaled-down version — both in terms of time length and magnitude — of what actually happens offshore, where construction can go on for months or even years, and on an amount of turbines that reaches more than 100 for some proposed projects.
In the first three years of the study, Mooney and his team focused on impacts of the noise on squid and black sea bass.
The sea bass, which initially saw behavioral changes after noise exposure, eventually returned to normal, which suggested “either some level of multiday habituation or preserving hearing loss,” a published journal study by the team said.
Squid also saw short-lived impacts, and the team’s found that squid are resilient to the noise. When exposed to the sound, squid exhibited dramatic behavioral change — they jet around more frequently, shoot out ink, and change the color of their skin cells, all “really vibrant responses,” Mooney said. But the researchers also saw that squid habituate really quickly, don’t lose the ability to hear, and don’t experience energy loss.
They’ve since expanded to study other ground-dwellers, such as scallops, lobster, and flounder, as they continue squid and black sea bass work.
Scallops, they have found, especially exhibited an adverse reaction to the noise. The shellfishes’ response was much less dramatic visually than the squid’s, but the researchers found that repeated strikes of the pile caused the scallops to open and close their mouths for hours.
“Essentially, they’re respiring harder,” which wears them out, Mooney said. The team even released the scent of a starfish predator after the scallops were exposed, and said the animals were less able to defend themselves. “All of the sudden, the mountain lion shows up, and they can’t get away,” Mooney said.
“Some of our results have been kind of unimpressive in the sense that it doesn’t damn fishing, and it doesn’t damn windmill installation. It shows some minor effects,” Nathan Formel, research assistant on the project, said.
But scallops saw the most serious results, he added. “They were constantly impacted.”
Scallops typically are open to let water exchange over the gills, but the noise exposure causes them to close up in a defensive response, which reduces oxygen exchange. “Oxygen’s vital for life,” so less oxygen means poorer health, Formel said.
This experiment doesn’t consider the overall health of the shellfish population, such as predator-prey relationships, but looks at behavioral and physiological changes when exposed to the loud noise. The team didn’t make declarative statements in their paper from 2022, but did express concern, based on their research, on the “larger impact ranges of impending widespread offshore wind farm constructions” for scallop populations.
Overall, the team’s goal is to give an unbiased perspective on what happens because of offshore wind construction. There are a lot of opinions on the offshore wind industry, Formel said, from fishermen who worry about their catch and livelihood to environmentalists who push for the alternative energy source.
“They’re both really valid arguments. We’re just trying to inform them,” Formel said. Formel added that generally they’ve seen impacts in the short term, but that they are less common than long-term impacts: “We’re putting something new into the ocean. We want to make sure we’re not doing something that we regret.”
There wasn’t a lot of data before Mooney and his team started, he said, and there’s no one doing a project quite like the one at WHOI. Mooney and his team, not confined to tanks, constructed an open-ocean system that’s unique, and could be scaled up to figure out what actually happens at the wind farm offshore, such as whether or not there are fewer benthic species in an area under construction. They are part of a larger collaboration with Duke University called Wildlife and Offshore Wind, which does a lot of mammal-based work in the field.
The experiment takes place over only a few weeks at the end of summer and early fall. Cages are set between one and 80 meters away from the source of the noise; the team equates one meter in the experimental environment to 880 meters in an actual offshore wind farm. The pile driving occurs in increments of about 15 minutes, or until the pile won’t push further into the seabed. Then, there is 15 minutes of quiet as they reset the pile. This occurs from around 12:30 pm to 3:30 pm every day for about a month, dependent on weather and the availability of the construction crew. In total, about five “treatments” of sound occur per day.
Compared with the pile used next to the dock in Woods Hole, offshore wind turbines are 30 times the size, Mooney said. He added that the hammers, essentially a big weight pulled up and and let go by a crane, used to pile-drive offshore are the largest hammers ever constructed. “You can envision that’s a much louder sound out there, especially when you’re this close,” he said over the noise. It’s also done much faster, he said.
To measure sound and behavior, the team constructed a labyrinth of technology in the water. They utilize hundreds of hours of video footage from 21 GoPros, as well as track the noise through six sound recorders in water, two accelerometers, and many acoustic tags and sensors.
Recently they’ve used a new tag on the squid and bass that measure sound on the actual animal, rather than in the environment around them, to get a higher resolution of how much sound they receive, or the acoustic dosage. Mooney compared these tags to a radiation-dose simulator at a power plant, or a Fitbit.
Through their experiment, they can measure the dosage of sound. “We know how long they’ve been exposed, and how loud it is here, and how loud it is over here, and how loud it is in between,” Mooney said as he pointed to different distances from the source. “We basically create a curve of dosage-based impacts.”
To apply this to work on an actual wind farm, Mooney said, they take readings, for example, 20 meters from the source, determine how loud that sound is and how much impact there is, and then plot that on a curve. “It’s just all about understanding the sound field and how that drops off, and then understanding how the animal will respond to these different phases.”
Mitigation is another element of their study. The data isn’t published yet, but last year, the team tried to see if a ramp-up procedure for pile driving that starts at a low amplitude then gets increasingly louder might be a better way to start, i.e. if it scares animals away from the area under construction.
For marine mammals, offshore wind developers often use bubble curtains to block sound, but Mooney said that doesn’t work for ground vibration and low frequencies.
The experiment is funded by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), and in part by the National Marine Fisheries Service (under the federal National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration). BOEM is responsible for management of the outer continental shelf for renewable energy development, and funds research on the marine environment to inform decisions on lease areas; any construction and operations plan for a proposed offshore wind project must include assessments of potential environmental impacts from construction, such as noise impact and exposure analysis.
The team publish the results in journals as well as handing in a report to BOEM. They also speak directly to the fishermen on research-backed impacts. “We try to get the data out there,” Mooney said but added that the rest is up to the stakeholders to figure out what to do.
Mooney said they’ve secured another year of funds for more lobster work, despite the fact that federal cuts have pushed scientific research to the back burner, and not only do they plan to use heart-rate tags on the crustaceans, they also plan to utilize local lobster fishermen, who can put sound recorders in traps and help determine whether or not the noise impacts their catch.
This is another layer of data that should have been collected well before the first Mono pile was driven.
Cart before the horse again!
Empire wind is situated on very fertile Sea scallop grounds, this could have serious long term affects on those grounds.
I fully appreciate WHOI for finally getting on board with an unbiased approach to their OSW development studies. 5 years ago I was told to go away by them for asking these questions that we’re now finding out the answers to,turns out my concerns were valid I guess.
This current administration pulling funding is not good but keep in mind the previous administration had time and money to ensure these studies were done and they didn’t properly do it.
The mess lives on!
When you drive massive steel poles into the seafloor, the ocean doesn’t just shrug it off. Low-frequency shockwaves ripple outward for miles, disorienting creatures that depend on vibration and sound to survive. Shellfish clamp up and stop feeding. Fish scatter from traditional grounds. Whales and dolphins, which rely on echolocation to communicate, hunt, and migrate, suddenly face a deafening wall of noise.
Unlike a passing ship, this isn’t momentary disturbance — it’s weeks or months of pounding at a single site, with construction repeating across dozens of lease areas. Layer in the gouging of trenches for cables, the permanent footprint of anchoring systems, and changes to currents around turbine towers, and the disruption multiplies. Benthic habitats are scraped and altered, spawning grounds get fragmented, and migratory routes turn hazardous.
Offshore wind may be branded “green,” but under the surface it delivers a relentless drumbeat of stress on species that already face pressures from warming waters, shifting ecosystems, and existing human activity. Energy may be renewable, but the damage to marine life is not.
” they plan to use heart-rate tags on the crustaceans ” Federal funds are still available for that while human health coverage spending is slashed. Wow, just wow
Where was this research when we were drilling thousands of oil wells, in the ocean and on land?
How about you focus your research on the massive amount of nuclear waste that going to be generated by these new little reactors that are going to be everywhere?
They have already broken ground on at least one reactor in Utah. At 40 cents and more per kw entering the grid, you would think people would care more about the nuclear disaster staring us in the face.
Some cancer rates are double the national average around the Idaho nuclear facilities.
“Some cancer rates are double the national average around the Idaho nuclear facilities.”
After making sure, I find claims that cancer rates around Idaho’s nuclear facilities are “double the national average” don’t stand up to serious scrutiny.
Extensive research by the U.S. National Cancer Institute found no evidence that counties near nuclear installations experience elevated cancer death rates.
Idaho’s own cancer registry reports show incidence rates roughly in line with national averages, not dramatically higher.
Peer-reviewed studies of nuclear facility workers—who receive far greater exposures than the general public—show at most modest increases for certain cancers, not a twofold spike. Population studies near nuclear sites consistently find no clear, consistent pattern of elevated risk once confounding factors like age, smoking, or socioeconomic differences are accounted for.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and none exists here. Unless someone can point to a robust epidemiological study supporting that figure, the “double cancer rate” claim is best described as unsupported and misleading.
No Commercial Nuclear power plants in Idaho and the tests you mention were found not to be statistically significant. There has been one nuclear disaster only at Chernobyl and that was due to Russian mismanagement and incompetence. Nuclear is safe ask the French.
Can we bury the nuclear waste in your backyard?
Putin bombed Chernobyl this February. He was attempting to create a second disaster with the same nuclear material that was a horrible disaster (regardless of the cause) only a few decades ago. Not hundreds of years. Not thousands of years. Not hundreds of thousands of years.
How dare we pass along nuclear waste to future generations?
How incredibly selfish!
Especially considering that we have safe wind and solar energy at our fingertips.
Mary, Martha’s Vineyard melanoma rates are significantly higher than expected. Our soil is often contaminated with the stuff we use to battle ticks and crabgrass. Aquinnah’s general cancer rate is also higher than normal for such a small community. Hispanics have higher rates of childhood leukemias and Jews have higher rates of adult leukemias. People living and working in lower manhattan during the 911 attacks have higher rates of many different cancers. Young people are now being diagnosed with colon cancer.
Our soil, food, medicines, air, water, lifestyle all contribute to environmentally caused cancers. There’s little we can do to halt “progress” that provides necessities to populations, like nuclear power. Pray for good genes and a strong immune system. My mom ate pizza and hot dogs and was overweight all her 98 years of life. If cancer doesn’t get us, heart disease, other illnesses, accidents, or being murdered by terrorists will. Pick your poison— there are many choices.
Inexcusable collateral damage?
Like oil drilling?
Grinding through all that rock.
If tapping your finger on an aquarium disturbs the fish inside, then pile driving must be torture for marine life.
I’m glad WHOI is studying this. I also realize with very little effort of personal research, that Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute was awarded millions from the Biden administration.
Because the Biden administration was a huge proponent of wind energy, I hope the study didn’t have ” don’t bite of the hand that feeds us ” attached
Amazing reporting by Hayley Duffy. There is so much unknown about the impacts of offshore wind but this research should be enough to stop it in its tracks.
Very good and informative article by the Times. These are the kinds of studies that need to be done. As the article states, there are some downsides to aquatic life. Has anyone claimed otherwise? But, the studies indicate that most of the effects are temporary and marine life habituates to it. The marine life in the gulf of Mexico during the construction and anchoring of more than 6,000 oil rigs as well as the drilling and ongoing operations seem to have survived. — I doubt they are silent, but my guess is the oil industry could not have cared less and blocked studies. Had they done any, we would have known about the effects of loud noises decades ago. And about that habituation— who would have ever thought that millions of humans would choose to live in a city, with round the clock sirens, horns, trains, planes and general deafening background noises. What about the creatures that lived there, and the ones that are currently being pushed out of their habitats by the continued expansion of human activity ? . Let’s face it– human activity affects wildlife– most people couldn’t care less, or even think about conserving electricity. They just complain about the price….
“We just want to figure out the best ways to develop renewable energy sustainably,” Mooney said. I applaud WHOI for doing this work with that purpose in mind.
All technologies have some negative impacts. Thank you WHOI for studying and illuminating some (and only some – there are others) of the harms of offshore wind. The question always is: are negative impacts better or worse than the alternative? Ultimately, offshore wind replaces fossil fuels, and it is essential to understand that fully 40% of international shipping is moving fossil fuels around the planet. Those ships cause untold damage to marine life, they leak and spill, spewing messy sludge into the ocean, and they require an extraordinary amount of energy to get petroleum from place to place and finally into homes, factories, and vehicles.
It’s easy to target offshore wind, because we can see it – huge towers with slow-turning blades to harness the breeze. And we can hear the construction. But it’s the other, the unseen, that not only poisons the sea each day but the sky above as well, as it causes the planet to heat up, burn, melt, and flood, that deeply offends me.
I look forward to the time when offshore wind turbines are all floating, without pile driving, causing far less impact on the seabed. Meanwhile, to me, even the current state of the technology, with its flaws, is far preferable and way way WAY less damaging to ocean life (and human life) than fossil fuels.
As Mooney said, “we just want to figure out the best ways to develop renewable energy sustainably.” Keep educating us, WHOI, this is stuff we need to know and learn to mitigate. We need to make renewables even better than they are. And we will.
Remember when there were sandeels in Vineyard waters…?
I used to trap lobsters. ?
The warming waters from climate change boiled them.
The first ocean wind farms date back to 1991. Where is all the data on wind environmental impacts for the past 35 years? My main concern is that these turbines contain a large amount of oil that could be released after a hurricane. Our beaches could be littered with oil. Also if a wind farm goes bankrupt us taxpayers will get stuck with billions in clean up cost. And who benefits from this power? It’s not coming here.
Paul– the oil in the turbines is enclosed in gear housings and secure containers on the transfer platforms. . How much force do you think it would take to crack open those housings ? Let’s be real. Even if the towers blow over I doubt any oil at all would leak out. If you are worried about oil leaking into the ocean, think about the oil rigs in the gulf of Mexico. — But they aren’t in your back yard, so it doesn’t matter. I really have to wonder how you, who is very familiar with the mechanical world can say that the electricity generated by these things is “not coming here”. Where do you think it’s going ? And where does the electricity we get come from ? Billions in decommissioning costs ? Andy always claims nuclear is safe. And that Chernobyl was a one time event and it was of course the Russian’s fault. Tell it to the people of Fukushima
What about the costs of decommissioning them ? Here’s just a little example of the costs of nuclear– https://en.as.com/latest_news/they-dumped-200000-radioactive-barrels-in-the-middle-of-the-ocean-80-years-later-france-leads-the-mission-to-recover-them-n/#tooltip-google who’s paying for that ? Of course, that stuff is not in “our ” ocean , so I guess that doesn’t matter either.
It’s true that turbine oils are stored within gear housings, but that doesn’t make them leak-proof. Offshore turbines face decades of harsh conditions—high winds, saltwater corrosion, and structural stress.
In Europe’s North Sea, where offshore wind has operated the longest, lubricant leaks have occurred from worn seals, ruptured lines, and overfilled systems. These aren’t catastrophic spills, but they show “enclosed” isn’t the same as “infallible.”
Power from these turbines feeds into ISO–New England’s regional grid, not directly to Vineyard homes. Electricity flows where demand and transmission capacity dictate—local generation doesn’t guarantee local consumption.
Decommissioning isn’t trivial either. While nuclear costs are higher, offshore wind decommissioning is estimated at hundreds of thousands per megawatt, and U.S. regulators have raised concerns about future funding shortfalls.
Referencing nuclear waste barrels from 80 years ago is unrelated to wind’s distinct environmental issues—like lubricant leaks, seabed disturbance, and cable impacts. Pointing to Gulf oil rigs isn’t reassuring; chronic leaks there are well documented, and Vineyard waters are far more sensitive.
This isn’t opposition to renewables—it’s about acknowledging real risks and costs rather than dismissing them outright.
All Vineyard Wind power goes into the grid. Period.
Murray–I am not dismissing the costs of wind turbines outright. I have emphasized the costs both economically and environmentally on many occasions. It seems to me that wind wins on both issues compared to nearly every other way to produce electricity. Leaks included– I was addressing Paul’s concerns about large amounts of oil washing up on the beaches from a nearly impossible event. We could certainly have debris from the broken blades. But not large amounts of oil. As for decommissioning –I disagree with your “hundreds of thousands of dollars per megawatt” comment. Since VW 1 is rated at 804 MW, just 2 hundred thousand per MW would put the decommissioning cost at about 5 Billion dollars. It only cost about 3.5 billion to put them up, and that included design, permitting, environmental studies, infrastructure projects and more . And remember, there is about 100 million dollars worth of recyclable scrap steel out there. Certainly, in terms of recyclability wind tops that list also.
I apologize for an inaccurate number. At $200,000 per megawatt it would cost about 1.6 billion to decommission VW1 still higher than it really will cost. But if Pam Blondie can claim that trump saved 285 million American lives last year alone by seizing some Fentanyl , I should just get a pass if I say it will only cost a thousand dollars to decommission. But again, sorry for the math error.
How much does it cost to house and provide an army to protect nuclear waste from a small nuclear reactor for 100,000 years?
It’s much, much more than decommissioning a few wind turbines. Maybe a hundred thousand times more.
I appreciate the thoughtful points, but the idea that wind “wins on both fronts” doesn’t hold up to real numbers.
Take decommissioning: UK and EU studies — from regions with decades of offshore experience — put removal costs at $350,000–$550,000 per megawatt, not “hundreds of thousands total.” For an 804 MW project, that’s hundreds of millions of dollars, due decades down the road when the original developer may be long gone. And that vaunted “$100 million in scrap” isn’t a piggy bank waiting to be cracked open — specialized vessels, composite blades, and fluctuating steel prices eat that up fast.
As for oil, no one’s talking about beaches awash in black goo, but chronic gear oil leaks from worn seals and ruptured lines have been documented in the North Sea for years. It’s not a “nearly impossible” scenario — it’s maintenance reality.
Wind has benefits, but pretending it’s cost-free and spotless is misleading. Communities deserve full, honest accounting, not feel-good shortcuts.
200 gallons max per turbine.
Average of 800 gallons per fish boat.
Half a gallon an hour plus in unburned hydrocarbons into the water.
The only thing that will make the wind farm go bank is the government prohibition.
We all benefit from the power.
All the wind power goes into the grid.
We get all of our power from the grid.
Who is paying to clean up Plymouth Nuclear?
what about fracking ?
Does that disturb subterranean creatures like worms and such ?
No one died at Fukushima and the exclusion zone is free from radiation which is no lower that that of being in an airplane at cruising level. FACT. Yes Chernobyl was Russia’s fault. Who else Keller Was it the fault of Bolivia or say Switzerland.
Your comment is very misleading.
Nuclear kills people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_accidents_by_death_toll