Nine years of one-year permits in the waters where the North Slope hunts

Federal regulators are taking comment on letting the Navy's research arm disturb whales, seals and walrus in the Beaufort and eastern Chukchi Seas. It would be the ninth straight year they have granted that permission, one year at a time.

That pattern is the objection. The Alaska Beluga Whale Committee has warned that disturbance repeated across many years can shift migration timing and distribution in ways a single-season review will never see. Each authorization is weighed as though it were the first.

These are the waters where North Slope and Bering Strait communities take bowhead, seal and walrus. Whaling crews work from shore-fast ice and open boats, so what matters is not only whether the whales come, but how close they pass and when. The Iñupiat Community of the Arctic Slope has argued that federal authorizations in these waters must put subsistence resources and cultural practice first.

The Office of Naval Research's work is classified as a military readiness activity under a 2004 defense law, a designation that changes how the National Marine Fisheries Service weighs what mitigation to require. The Center for Biological Diversity has argued those exemptions leave already-struggling marine mammals exposed in ecologically sensitive waters.

Regulators are also weighing a one-time renewal that would carry the authorization a year past this one. Comments are due Aug. 21.