The gargantuan tangle of steel sparkled in the early morning sun 150 miles southwest of New Orleans. Resting on its side across a barge the size of two soccer fields, it spanned a quarter mile of ocean and towered 430 feet above the waves.
This was the "jacket," or undersea support system, for Platform Bullwinkle, the tallest offshore oil and gas production complex ever built. When completed, the jacket, decks, housing, and drilling derrick would tower 1,615 feet--15 stories higher than the world's tallest building, Chicago's Sears Tower.
Helmeted workers used acetylene torches to sever the fasteners that held the jacket on the barge. Hydraulic jacks inched the 49,000-ton structure forward. Then, as gravity took over, greased skids billowed smoke, and the barge shuddered. The jacket plunged into the sea. As thundering seawater slowly filled the hollow legs, the structure settled to the ocean floor.
At peak annual production rates, Platform Bullwinkle's 60 wells will provide enough fuel to run 1.4 million cars and enough natural gas to heat 300,000 Frost Belt homes for an entire year. But the beehive of activity above the waves is only a small part of the story. Almost as soon as the monstrous jungle gym was lowered into place, a miracle of life was being acted out beneath the waves. A new habitat was being born.
Every day, sponges, hydroids, anemones, barnacles, mussels, and many corals release their infant progeny into the ocean's tides and currents. Most of these larvae strut and fret a brief hour upon Neptune's stage, and then are heard no more. A lucky few will find a hard surface, like the steel tubes of Bullwinkle's jacket. These larvae will attach themselves, metamorphose into adult form, and continue their life cycles.
Their search is not an easy one, for each of these animals requires a hard surface, or substrate, to which it can attach. It is a rare commodity indeed--especially in the Gulf of Mexico. The Mississippi and Atchafalaya rivers alone carry some 230 million tons of sediment a year to the Gulf. The not very surprising result here, and around the world near other rivers, from the Amazon to the Yangtze, is vast, featureless expanses of mud and sand. These underwater deserts offer few hard surfaces, provide little shelter or habitat diversity, have comparatively limited food supplies, and thus support only limited members and varieties of marine life.
In environments like these, a rubble pile, sunken ship, or other artificial reef is a veritable godsend. Originally conceived by Japanese fisherman Shinzo Nishida in 1795, man-made reefs of every description have become increasingly vital to fishery management and production programs in many nations.
However, until recently, the largest and perhaps most successful of all man-made reef systems was largely unrecognized. It is composed of over 6,000 petroleum production platforms (or offshore oil rigs) that rise like miniature steel islands out of oceans across the globe.
Where Nature and Technology Meet
For the sea's larvae and other creatures, Bullwinkle
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