Today, there are more than 10,000 installations fixed or floating in the Earth’s oceans. Many of them are far larger and extend deeper than Holly. Perdido, now the world’s deepest, reaches down 2,400 meters to the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. Made in Finland, it took three months to reach its resting place.
Only the oil industry has the ambition and funds to build such elaborate structures in our oceans. And because the oil industry has a lot of ambition and a lot of funds, it has built a lot of structures like Holly over the last 80 years or so: in the Gulf of Mexico, where the platforms are most numerous, an archipelago of about 6,000 of these artificial islands runs the length of the coast from Alabama all the way to the US-Mexico border.
The oil companies that underwrote the platforms and the engineers who designed them did not set out to create new habitat for wildlife underneath the massive structures, but that’s exactly what they did. What makes Holly a good design for oil extraction—four massive steel legs that run the depth of the water column, braced by beams that run horizontally, vertically, and diagonally to make an open weave that quickly dissipates ocean energy—is also what makes it an excellent habitat for sheltering an amazing diversity of sea creatures from sharks, turtles, and dolphins to the tiny hard and soft coral polyps that crust over the metal legs and transform them into a riot of color and texture, attracting hundreds of thousands of fish into their midst.
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