Offshore wind farms are becoming part of America and the world's renewable energy landscape.

And now the Gulf of Maine is being considered a possible site for offshore wind development.

In this series of stories, you'll learn about this emerging technology and what it might mean for you, our coastal communities, and the Gulf of Maine's natural environment.

In this segment, part seven of 11, we will dive into the environmental and cultural considerations of developing transmission cables.

The wind turbines are arranged in rows so that they'll be they'll be able to connect to all the cables together in one place and then bring them to what's called a substation, so that all that power gets gathered into one spot.

And then there's usually like 1 or 2 export cables.

That's a big cable about this big in diameter and it moves the power from the wind farm all the way to a point of interconnection that goes right into the land based grid.

Although there have been many studies on the environmental impacts of cabling in a laboratory setting, fishermen are concerned about the impacts of cables once they are in the ocean.

We need to know how this cabling will affect habitat.

Essential fish habitat.

Will the disruption be, you know, more than minimal and more than temporary?

If it is, we're going to have to have discussions around that.

And I realize this stuff takes time.

Scientific study on average, probably takes at least three years to to go from the start of setting it up.

So the impacts around burried subsea transmission cables, is that when you bury them, there's obviously disturbing the bottom habitat.

The softer the sediment, they can use a technology called jet plowing, which allows the substrate to basically kind of be made into a mush slurry and allows it to settle at depth and then usually about 5 to 6ft deep.

So anything that's to serve and this is, soft sediment, you're going to have some loss of benthic life because you can't disturb the bottom habitat for a lot of times organisms that are basically, nonmoving.

So they're sessil.

So they basically get buried or smothered and hopefully part of that, if it's submerging it and sinking into the substrate or putting it on in part, is not only to protect the cable, because that's the main function.

The side function is, is that hopefully you're reducing the electromagnetic fields, that are coming off the cable and interacting with organisms above the substrate.

If approved, wind farms in the Gulf of Maine would be different from most other existing wind farms.

The number of turbines is not yet known, but it's planned to be on a much larger scale than any other commercial operation.

Our way is to be connected to the environment in a way where you adapt and change with it.

David Weeden of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe and other tribal members want to ensure that offshore wind development won't cause harm to the environment or to their cultural history.

So 12,000 years, the glacial maximum ended pretty much where the Cape Sea Line is now.

And so those areas were exposed back then.

We were living out in front of those.

And then as the glacial maximum receded, we moved with it.

And our position is that, because we once lived on those lands, you can't confirm or deny that you're not going to impact archeological sites or burials out in those areas.

You're finding oyster shells that are ten, 12,000 years old.

Who's to say that you're not going to impact a burial that's 10 to 12,000 years old?

You know, there are relatives.

We have responsibilities to take care of them and ensure that they are not disturbed.

So there are a lot of processes to review potential impacts and changes.

And there's a lot of processes that depending on what areas may potentially be impacted gives you an opportunity to say this area needs to be avoided and to reroute either the cable routes or to exclude an area from wind turbine development once they start looking at it.

The Winds of Change in the Gulf of Maine series is a co-production of New Hampshire PBS and New Hampshire Sea Grant, with support from the University of New Hampshire.

Production funding was provided by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.