It’s hard to believe a proposal so huge and so destructive could slip through so quietly, and yet here we are.
Unless you’ve been paying close attention over the past two weeks, you might have missed the official announcement of a plan to conduct Australia’s largest ever 3D seismic blasting survey off the Tasmanian, Victorian and South Australian coasts.
The area of ocean set to be blasted is enormous, stretching from King Island and northwest Tasmania right across Victoria’s Otway coast to the South Australian border.
The proposal is being put forward by multinational oil and gas exploration companies TGS and Schlumberger and plans to blast an area of 5.5 million hectares – an area almost as big as Tasmania – over the course of four years, searching for gas deposits under the sea floor.
The vast blasting area includes critical marine ecosystems, two marine national parks, and blue whale migration routes.
