Sonic Pipelines at the Seafloor

Abstract

How did the offshore oil industry develop the means to image the seafloor with photographic precision? What are the stakes of producing images through processes that simultaneously produce carcasses? This essay addresses these questions by charting the ambivalent history of reflection seismology from the 1940s to the present day. In the postwar era, when offshore drilling was just emerging, companies like Union Oil, Shell Oil, Macco Corporation, and affiliated researchers were key actors in the development of offshore prospecting techniques. From wire sounding technologies like the soundfish to modern airgun surveys, the hunt for energy resources paved the way for high-resolution imaging of the ocean floor, despite devastating ecological casualties. Drawing from sound studies scholarship in addition to interviews and oceanographic records, this essay focuses on how petroleum surveys have affected the material space of their interventions. In particular, I theorize the survey as a distinct framework for knowledge that privileges comprehensive and continuous information feeds. I contend that the repeated bias toward frictionless signal in combination with discourses of energy security has obscured and even justified the harmful ecological impacts of reflection seismology on ocean environments. Ultimately, I argue that rather than starting with the visual abstractions of survey maps and seismic images, attention must be returned to the violent sonic “bangs” of surveying—a recurring event that is inseparable from the nonhuman and environmental agencies, casualties, and affects that co-constitute the media-making process.