Shearwater GeoServices Brand Guidelines: The Bergen Seismic Fleet Built Since 2016

A Bergen company registered in 2016.

Shearwater GeoServices is a marine seismic company based in Bergen, on Norway’s west coast. The Norwegian business register in Brønnøysund records both the operating company, Shearwater GeoServices AS, and its parent, Shearwater GeoServices Holding AS, as founded on 19 May 2016 in Bergen, classed under geological surveys. Its recent releases spell the name Shearwater Geoservices, and its website and slogans now mostly say simply “Shearwater.” It is unrelated to Shearwater Research, the Canadian maker of dive computers.

It began with two Norwegian owners. In August 2018 the company described itself as jointly owned by GC Rieber Shipping and Rasmussengruppen, with a fleet of four modern seismic vessels. GC Rieber is a Bergen group that, Store norske leksikon says, operates specialist ships for seismic work, subsea operations and polar voyages. Rasmussengruppen is a Kristiansand group that, according to the same encyclopedia, has since 2000 worked mainly in financial investments, property and offshore activity.

Its business is collecting and processing seismic data at sea. The company says it uses seismic vessels and equipment “to explore beneath the seabed” and processes the data with its own software, and it describes itself as “a global marine geoscience and technology business.” Its website says it designs both nodes that sit on the ocean floor and sensors towed from surface vessels, and turns the results into 2D, 3D and 4D images of the subsurface. Alongside survey work for oil and gas, its website offers storage solutions — surveying and monitoring sites for carbon, hydrogen and nuclear waste storage — access to its multi-client data, and processing and imaging services.

Its own account of its growth is brief and undated. The company’s history page says that when it looked as if the world was pulling back from offshore exploration, Shearwater “doubled down on its investment,” and that the oldest companies that became Shearwater were founded before the first marine reflection seismic survey had been recorded.

Three fleets in three years.

Shearwater grew mainly by taking over other companies’ fleets. On 22 August 2018 it and Schlumberger announced an agreement for Shearwater to buy the marine seismic acquisition assets and operations of WesternGeco, Schlumberger’s geophysical product line. The package, the announcement said, comprised ten seismic vessels — seven 3D ships and three multipurpose ships configured for ocean-bottom work — twelve complete streamer sets, two source vessels, and WesternGeco’s marine seismic technology with development and manufacturing facilities in Norway and Malaysia.

The deal was completed on 15 November 2018. Shearwater then said it owned and operated fourteen fully equipped seismic vessels and had close to 600 employees, and gave its new ownership as Rasmussengruppen 65 per cent, GC Rieber Shipping 20 per cent and Schlumberger 15 per cent.

The second step was CGG. In January 2020, the trade magazine GeoExpro reported, Shearwater completed a transaction with the French geophysical group, taking over five high-end streamer vessels and two older ones, five complete streamer sets and a five-year agreement to supply survey capacity to CGG, now Viridien. GeoExpro wrote that this completed CGG’s exit from marine acquisition, and that Shearwater’s fleet then stood at 23 vessels, including three multipurpose ocean-bottom ships and two dedicated source vessels.

The third came from Polarcus, the seismic operator whose lenders, GeoExpro reported in May 2021, had instructed it in February that year to end operations. At the end of April 2021 Shearwater bought Polarcus’s streamers and related seismic equipment, and six of its seismic vessels, from a lender-controlled company, both GeoExpro and the trade site Offshore Energy reported. Store norske leksikon, in an entry updated in 2026, puts Shearwater’s fleet at 26 seismic ships and calls it by far the largest seismic company.

Design and documentation.

Seismic and geophysical survey companies sell something most people never see: an image of rock layers far below the ground or the seabed. Their websites therefore lean on pictures of the work itself. Survey vessels towing long streamer cables, land crews laying out sensors across desert or farmland, and vibrator trucks lined up on a survey line are the photographs these companies publish again and again, usually next to a coloured cross-section of the subsurface.

Those seismic-image samples do much of the visual work. A processed section, with its bands of colour and folded layers, shows what the company delivers far more quickly than a paragraph of text could. Multi-client data libraries, where a company surveys an area once and licenses the data to several clients, are usually presented through interactive maps and region pages, described in the terms each company chooses for its own library.

Equipment makers and node operators follow a slightly different pattern. Ocean-bottom node pages, land nodal systems and streamer products tend to appear as clean product shots against white or dark backgrounds, with named product lines and launch dates. Land-crew and field-service pages add maps, location lists and training or support offers. Many of these firms also present newer work in mining, geothermal, carbon storage and infrastructure monitoring alongside oil and gas.

Because several of the companies are listed, investor pages are a large part of the picture: results, governance documents and regulated information, laid out in the plain, orderly style that stock exchanges expect. Names change often in this sector, through mergers, renames and asset sales, so a company’s history page and its newsroom are usually the clearest record of who it is today and what it used to be called.

“Make waves.”

Shearwater presents itself in the language of the sea. Its home page opens with the line “Make waves,” its history page calls the team “wave makers,” and its About page says “just 29% of the earth’s surface is covered by land, we cover the rest.” It lists four values — Empowerment, Action, Responsibility and Curiosity — and says its head office is in Bergen and that it is proud of its Norwegian heritage.

Its technology carries its own names. The company names its towed-streamer technology Isometrix and its ocean-bottom node technology Pearl; its processing software, Reveal, handles land, ocean-bottom, marine, 4D and vertical seismic profile (VSP) data, and the company says it first ran Reveal in the cloud in 2014. Shearwater also says it is the only marine seismic company with sizable in-house research, engineering and manufacturing facilities; that is its own claim.

Its recent work spans oil and gas and carbon storage. In July 2026 it announced a 3D survey to appraise carbon storage potential in the Bonaparte Basin in northern Australia, to be run by the vessel SW Bly and described as its second carbon-storage survey in that basin after a 2024 campaign; the same release put its workforce at around 1,000 people. In September 2026 it launched the Amapá 3D multi-client survey off northern Brazil with SLB, using Isometrix aboard the Amazon Warrior, with SLB processing the data.

For a design guide, Shearwater shows how a young company built from other firms’ fleets can give itself one voice through a short slogan and plain-spoken values. Compare Polarcus, whose ships it bought, and PGS, another Norwegian seismic fleet. For this guide we use a North Sea blue and a kelp teal with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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