McCauley was referring to the results of an experiment testing the impacts of a common oil and gas industry technique in waters off southern Australia, which were reported in a scientific paper in June 2017.

The world’s powerful offshore oil and gas industry has used seismic surveys for decades as the primary way to locate fossil fuels under the ocean floor.

Impacts of Seismic Surveys

Seismic surveys involve an underwater air gun pulled behind a boat and fired at intervals, and as the shock waves bounce off the sea floor and return to sensors, they help reveal where oil and gas might be.

McCauley, an associate professor at Curtin University in Western Australia, and his colleagues wanted to know what these seismic surveys did to zooplankton — an organism at the base of the marine food web.

According to their results, published in the Nature journal Ecology and Evolution, there was a two to three-fold increase in the number of dead zooplankton at a distance of at least 1.2 kilomenters (about three-quarters of a mile) from the air gun after the blasts. That is much farther than previous reports of impacts out to only 10 meters or so (roughly 33 feet).

But as reported in Guardian Australia, two major U.S. oil and gas industry groups have been writing to regulators describing McCauley’s findings as “seriously flawed” while commissioning other unnamed experts who have also criticized the study.

McCauley, who has been researching the impacts of seismic surveys on marine life since the early 1990s, told Guardian Australia the criticisms of his research were a “whitewash.”

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