US Navy ordered to protect whales by lowering sonar levels

The US Navy’s sonar levels may harm whales and other marine mammals in the world’s oceans, so they must be scaled back, a San Francisco federal appeals court has ruled.

According to the decision by the Ninth US Circuit Court in San Francisco on Friday, US officials wrongly allowed the Navy to use sonar at levels that harmed marine mammals, and the Navy would have to scale back low-frequency sonar in the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans as well as the Mediterranean Sea, under authority granted in 2012.  Read more.