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| Oil-Lantis |
A metaphorically true story:
"When filmmaker Marc Wolfensberger first found out about Neft Daşları, he thought it was a myth. He kept hearing about this secretive city, sprawled like floating, rusting tentacles across the Caspian Sea, far from the nearest shoreline. But very few had ever seen it, he said. 'The degree of mystery was enormously high.' It wasn’t until he saw it with his own eyes, when he managed to travel there on a water delivery ship in the late 1990s, that he knew it was real. It 'was beyond anything I had seen before,' he told CNN. Guarded by military vessels, it was like 'a motorway in the middle of the sea,' he said, stretching out 'like an octopus.' Desperate to document this mind-boggling city, he spent eight years convincing Azerbaijan’s government to let him return, which he finally did in 2008, spending two weeks there to make his film, 'Oil Rocks: City Above the Sea.'
(Oil-Qaeda City). To oceanographers who are concerned about the melting cryosphere this is an apt metaphor.
It is an apt metaphor because it aptly describes the condition of a civilization addicted to oil.
Like addiction to heroin et alia degeneration is part of the scene:
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| No, it isn't a Rock band (Oil Rocks: City Above the Sea). |
"THE OIL ROCKS – Behind this enigmatic name lies the first and largest offshore oil town ever built. A vast, sprawling web of oil platforms in the middle of the Caspian Sea, commissioned by Stalin in 1949. Imagine: 2,000 oil rigs, 300 kilometres of bridges, rusty old Soviet trucks rolling back and forth, nine-storey building blocks, thousands of oil workers, a cultural palace, a lemonade factory, a green park ...
Sixty years on, the Oil Rocks still stand. But two-thirds of the infrastructure has been regained by the sea. A kind of Oil Atlantis, only real."
Petroleum Civilization: The Final Chapter (Confusing Life with Death), 2, 3, 4
Seaports With Sea Level Change, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35
Here's a fun possibility . . .
ReplyDeletehttps://www.cbsnews.com/losangeles/news/study-drilling-may-have-caused-deadly-1933-long-beach-quake/
For those who have navigated the Gulf of Alaska using only a compass and depth-finder (after storm knocks out radar), note that I did so in 1970 on an 85' wood boat that had been made in 1932. The trip was from Kodiak Island to the lighthouse just south of Homer, then on to Cape Fairweather, then on to Cross Sound (northernmost entry point to the Alexander Archepelego), then on down to Seattle after navigating though Seymour Narrows. The nautical chart depths were way off due to the 1964 Alaska Earthquake. The sea floor lifted up all across the gulf (thousands of square miles of seafloor lifted as much as 100' at some points). The factor to consider is that sea level has been falling in that area for quite a while because the Glacier Bay ice sheet has been melting. Read up on it in the Dredd Blog series "Proof of Concept" which contains 11 episodes, the most recent being about that quake (Link)
ReplyDeleteFourteen years ago I pointed out on Ecocosmology Blog that sea level change can trigger geologic events as great weight changes take place as the sea level falls or rises in a given area (Global Warming & Volcanic Eruptions). The concept was followed up on in a Dredd Blog series (Is A New Age Of Pressure Upon Us?).
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