Just outside Mthatha, on the N2 as you approach from East London and the Transkei Wild Coast, is a Shell Ultra City. During the summer holidays it is one of the busiest filling stations in the country.
Could I ask you, on my knees, to give the Shell offering a miss this year. In fact, could we decide not to fill up at all with Shell. Drive past. There are plenty of other gas stations around.
If you do pull up at the Mthatha Shell Ultra City, know this: at the moment you do, from December 1, Shell will be blasting sound waves into the pristine ocean you may be about to visit, or have just enjoyed. Sea creatures will be in indescribable agony because of it. Don’t give this company your business.
For background, Shell, with the support of the department of minerals & energy (minister, Gwede Mantashe), is undertaking a seismic survey of the seas off the Wild Coast, between Morgan’s Bay and Port St Johns, for the whole of December. They will be mapping the ocean floor, searching for signs of oil or gas, using a high-powered airgun that blasts the seafloor every 10 seconds and then, via the echoes it receives, is able to estimate the shape of the seafloor and beyond. The sound waves can penetrate over 1,000m into the earth.
But here’s the thing. Each one of those blasts, if you were swimming underwater 100m from the ship, would probably kill you. Each blast measures 260 decibels. By my calculations, one of those every 10 seconds for a month would be a total of 252,000 blasts.
The online magazine Nature Ecology & Evolution estimated in 2017 that in a study of zooplankton, the feedstock that underpins all life at sea, all krill larvae within 1.2km of an airgun blast were killed. . The New York Times in 2019 quoted Douglas Nowacek, a professor of marine conservation at Duke University, saying airguns blasts “have been detected 4,000km away. These are huge, huge impacts.”
Sound travels better underwater than it does through the air. Get into your pool and ask an uncle to get in on the other side and fart and you’ll see (or hear) what I mean.
So Shell, where you’re filling up, is going to lay a ship off the Wild Coast and cover more than 6,000km² of sea, blasting every 10 seconds a sound (and I looked this up) 10,000 times louder than a nuclear explosion would sound if you where unlucky enough to be 500m away from it. And it will do that more of a quarter of a million times.
The oil industry claims its airguns don’t do much damage but then its executives don’t live underwater
I’m not much of an environmentalist but there’s something disgusting about hurting and killing wild animals. How does a government come away from all of its sanctimonious declarations of regard for the Earth at COP26 in Glasgow and then give the world a finger on a wild, fossil-fuel bet in some of the most dangerous seas in the world?
Even if they find oil off Coffee Bay, what mad authority would give permission for it to be drilled? It is not called the Wild Coast for nothing. Does no-one remember the well-head blowout at Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico, the largest marine oil spill in history?
Of course, the oil industry claims its airguns don’t do much damage but then its executives don’t live underwater. I called SLR Consulting in Cape Town. It was appointed by Shell to distribute notification of the “seismic survey”. I asked for Eloise Costandius, an SLR “associate environmental consultant”, to ask how and when the notification was done. A lady answered the phone and came back to say Eloise wasn’t available but could she help? Yes please, I said, and asked her my question.
At that point her voice rose to a fake cheerful pitch to tell me that she couldn’t help me and that, in fact, Eloise was already on holiday. How lovely for her. If she is anywhere (italicise anywhere) on the coast for her holiday, Eloise will be within hearing distance of her client’s airgun blasts.
Every. Ten. Seconds.
There are whales off the Transkei coast at this time of the year. I’ve often seen them. Shell will kill many this Christmas and those it doesn’t kill will lose their hearing and thus their ability to communicate with each other, which is the whole point of being a whale. For all sea life off Transkei, the world is about to change forever. You do not recover from the carnage about to be unleashed. Shell should be ashamed of itself.
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