Inside The High Tech Effort To Prevent The US Navy From Running Over Whales

For instance, researchers were able to figure out a “lethal” and “safe” zone for whales relative to a given naval vessel, based on the size and position of both.
New insights to prevent US vessels from striking whales. In 2009 he and his team used an artificial basin at the Naval Surface Warfare Center in West Bethesda, Maryland, to test the hydrodynamics of ???ship strikes??? ??? collisions between vessels and the massive yet highly vulnerable sea mammals.

Undertaken at a military facility and by a government organization ??? Silber works for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA ??? their resulting study had a purpose far beyond satisfying the researchers’ individual curiosity.

???What we did was build a whale model that was completely to scale,??? Silber told Business Insider. ???The same density, the same weight, the same size, relative to the size of the vessel model. And then we ran the ship model at the whale.??? Researchers hoped that studying the dynamics of a simulated collision could help develops methods for avoiding ship strikes.

Granted, there were limits to what the study could achieve. Living whales are likely to move as a collision unfolds, and organic tissue don’t have the same properties as the plastic resin and fiberglass model the researchers used. But the simulations still gave a glimpse into what happens in the “near field,” Silber’s term for the few dozen yards that are closed before a ship and a whale collide.
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