(100) Beached Whales, Dolphins Die in Australia (50 more at risk)

HOBART, Australia -- About 100 whales and dolphins died after beaching on a southern Australian island Sunday, and about 50 more were still at risk, a government official said.

Wildlife officers were headed for King Island between the Australian mainland and the southeast island state of Tasmania to help rescue efforts.

http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/world/wire/sns-ap-australia-beached-whales,0,2181506.story?coll=sns-ap-world-headlines

(ENN) -- Environmentalists around the world are alarmed at the possibility that low-frequency sound tests, similar to those just concluded by the Navy off the coast of Hawaii, may have been responsible for a mass stranding of Cuvier's beaked whales in the Ionian Sea in 1996.

Environmental groups and a number of cetacean scientists are campaigning against the U.S. Navy's Low-Frequency Active Sonar (LFAS) because they fear it will harm all marine mammals. The system has been under development for the past decade in response to a new generation of "quiet" nuclear and diesel electric submarines.

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), hearing is a marine mammal's most important sense. LFAS consists of very loud, very low-frequency sounds designed to carry long distances underwater. It was developed by the Navy to detect submarines across large distances.

To test the system, the Navy targeted a series of sonic "pulses" of increasingly higher decibel levels at whales from progressively closer distances until and unless the whales showed any signs of distress or noticeable changes in behavior.

http://www.cnn.com/EARTH/9804/16/whales.sonar/
We're melting their brains.

Apparently they switch every thousands of years and I saw a documentary that said the poles are slowly starting to switch again. Anyway, that's the theory. That also could explain why the animals are getting confused when they migrate.