Shell is set to spend the next four months searching for oil and gas along a virtually untouched South African coastline.
The million-pound company plans to look for fossil fuels underneath the sea along the Eastern Cape’s Wild Coast – a stretch of land aptly named for its untamed wilderness and lack of major industrialisation.
But Shell’s ships will have to conduct three-dimensional seismic surveys to do this, using underwater explosions to record ground vibrations which can indicate what natural resources lay beneath.
Environmentalists worry the sound of these explosions, usually created with airguns, will leave marine life ‘panicked and damaged’.
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