Free Fire on the Horizon by Tom Shroder Page A

forming vast reservoirs of oil and gas. The Gulf of Mexico happens to have a lot of these upside-down cups of oil.
    In the past two decades, ships towing three-and-a-half-mile-long cables studded with sensitive underwater microphones (called hydrophones) have made carefully charted sweeps of the North American continental shelf. Periodic bursts into the water with an air gun or a charge of dynamite create seismic waves that penetratethe sea bottom. As the waves hit each new obstacle—a bank of mud, an outcropping of limestone—a portion of the wave energy is reflected back toward the hydrophones. Mud reflects differently than limestone, and limestone reflects differently than salt deposits or impermeable rock. The techniques are not new. Seismic calculations were first made by engineers during World War I to triangulate the positions of large enemy guns. But the equipment developed thereafter was so sensitive, and the computers analyzing their data so powerful, that they allowed geologists to create three-dimensional maps of structures thousands of feet beneath the earth’s surface.
    In 2003, after months of seismographic trolling, the sound shadow of one of these domes appeared on a study of an area forty-one miles off the southeastern coast of Louisiana in the middle of the Mississippi Canyon, a five-mile-wide undersea ravine that runs along the Gulf bottom for seventy-five miles. The resulting charts of the survey looked like a series of Rorschach tests, and what British Petroleum saw in them was profit.
    Five years later, in March 2008, BP bought the rights to drill in what was officially designated Block 252 of the Mississippi Canyon in the United States’ exclusive economic zone of the Gulf of Mexico—or actually leased them, since all oil rights on the outer continental shelf, which extends two hundred to three hundred miles from the coast, belong in perpetuity to the federal government. For the rights to explore for oil on the 5,760-acre block of ocean bottom under five thousand feet of water, they narrowly outbid five competing companies by offering $34 million.
    In order to maintain secrecy about their new lease, and perhaps with a lingering romantic sensibility from the wildcat days, oil companies designate their prospective sites with code names. BP saw an opportunity for taking care of corporate business in thenaming rights. Who hasn’t dreamed of bestowing an everlasting name on a continent, a mountain, a star? Why not an oil well? Naming rights for Block 252 were made the prize in a company United Way fund-raising contest. The winner, a BP employee with a literary bent, came up with the name Macondo, after the fictional town created by Gabriel García Márquez and the setting of his masterpiece of magical realism, One Hundred Years of Solitude .
    In the novel, Macondo starts out as a speck of a town in the middle of the jungle, then expands physically and culturally until it is a dynamic but deeply flawed city whose citizens fall prey to their own greed and begin to take moral shortcuts. Macondo’s promising beginning succumbs to a series of plagues and wars, until finally it is blown off the face of the planet by an explosive windstorm. In a final irony, the citizens of Macondo have been warned, in writing, of the tragedy to come, but the warning has been written in a language nobody is able interpret until the final moment, when it is already too late.
    For those looking for ill omens in retrospect, the name couldn’t have been more tragically apt. Nor could the initial choice of rig to drill the well.
     
    BP chose the Transocean-owned Marianas, a twenty-four-year-old semi-submersible with a long history. The Marianas had been destined to brush up against disaster from her 1979 birth as the MSV Tharos at Mitsubishi Heavy Industries’ shipyard in a city synonymous with catastrophe, Hiroshima, Japan. She was designed to fill what the offshore industry perceived as a worrisome gap in its plan to