They Won in Court. The Company Came Back Anyway.
South Africa's courts keep ruling against offshore seismic surveys. The surveys keep happening.
South Africa’s coastal fishing communities have forced the courts to intervene against offshore seismic and drilling permits five times since 2021. The blasting may have happened regardless. This is an Ocean Rising investigation, part one.
In March 2022, a fourth-generation fisher named Christian John Adams went to the Western Cape High Court in Cape Town and heard a judge confirm what he had argued for months: an Australian seismic company had begun firing airguns across the seabed off his fishing grounds without consulting his community, without obtaining the required environmental authorisation, and without so much as translating its notices into isiXhosa, one of the three official languages of the Western Cape.
The company’s executive vice-president, Alan Hopping, said South Africa was “un-investable for us.”
Four months later, they were back.
This is a story about how South Africa’s offshore oil and gas permitting system is designed, and what that design means for the fishing communities that depend on the same waters.
What a seismic survey actually is
A seismic survey for oil and gas works by firing compressed air from guns towed behind a ship. The blast, at Searcher’s source level roughly 255 decibels measured underwater and one of the loudest sounds produced by human activity, travels down through the water, hits the seabed, bounces back, and is captured by sensors trailing behind the vessel on cables stretching 8.1 kilometres. The returning signals are used to map what lies beneath the seabed: the geological formations that might contain oil or gas. (Underwater decibels are measured relative to one micropascal at one metre, a different scale to in-air decibels, but at this source level the signal is detectable thousands of kilometres away; airgun noise from surveys has been recorded at ranges exceeding 3,000 kilometres.)
The blasts repeat every ten seconds, around the clock, for months at a time.
For marine life, the noise is unavoidable. Fish with swim bladders (the air-filled organ that controls buoyancy) can suffer physical injury close to the source. Further away, evidence from multiple studies points to behavioural disruption: fish move, stop feeding, alter their migration routes. The science is genuinely contested. A large-scale Australian study published in PNAS in 2021, partly funded by the oil and gas companies Santos and Woodside, found no evidence of short-term or long-term effects on demersal fish populations on the North West Shelf of Western Australia. An Australian research team published a preprint in 2025 with starkly different findings: catch rates for eastern school whiting fell by 99 per cent following a 3D seismic survey, with effects persisting for at least ten months, and tiger flathead fell by 75 per cent. The authors attributed the declines to fish displacement rather than mortality, and the methodology has not yet been through peer review. What both studies agree on is that results vary significantly by species, and that the cumulative effect of repeated surveys in the same waters has barely been studied anywhere.
Snoek, the fast, predatory fish that is as close to a cultural staple as the West Coast has, has never been studied in this context. No species-specific research exists on what seismic surveys do to snoek populations. What West Coast fishers know is what they observe: that snoek are harder to find, that seasons are shorter, that the effort required to catch the same haul keeps increasing.
Whether that is because of seismic surveys, climate change, overfishing, or some combination, no institution has been tasked with finding out.
This is where the Ocean Rising investigation begins. What follows, the legal record, the permitting pattern, and the structural question no one in government wants to answer, is for paid subscribers.
