Diving beneath the oil rig, Alex had to anticipate when the cormorants would burst through the fish shoal. The birds hide behind the legs of the rig after they plunge into the dark waters, gaining the ...

Offshore oil rigs near Santa Barbara, California (aerial photography by Drew Bird Photography) ...

On 20 April 2010, the oil rig Deepwater Horizon exploded. A photograph of an oil-soaked pelican came to epitomise the environmental disaster and helped galvanise the clean-up.

Long before offshore oil rigs are put together, much less sent out into the open ocean, they're expertly designed. Schematics are drawn up, and in many cases, engineers will take these plans and ...

The world's largest platform, the Berkut oil rig in the Russian Pacific, weighs about 200,000 tons. The Petronius, located 130 miles off the coast of New Orleans would be the fourth tallest ...

Any offshore oil rig that extends past 1500 meters is considered to be an ultra-deepwater production facility. However, that's still nowhere close to the deepest man has explored in the ocean.

This article was originally published with the title “ The Afterlives of Oil Rigs ” in Scientific American Magazine Vol. 331 No. 5 (December 2024), p. 54 doi: ...

You’ve probably seen hulking offshore oil rigs in places like the Pacific Ocean or the Gulf of Mexico. But from the shore, it’s hard to see how truly ginormous some of these oil platforms are.

As it stands, roughly 12,000 offshore oil and gas rigs pepper the world's coastlines. These platforms typically operate for between 20 and 40 years.