Every square inch is covered in life : the ageing oil rigs that became marine oases | Marine life | The Guardian
Now, as California and the US shift away from offshore drilling and toward greener energy, a debate is mounting over their future. On one side are those who argue disused rigs are an environmental blight and should be removed entirely. On the other side are people, many of them scientists, who say we should embrace these accidental oases and that removing the structures is morally wrong. In other parts of the world, oil rigs have successfully become artificial reefs, in a policy known as rigs to reefs.
For Milton Love, a scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who was on the boat with Bull, it s a matter of ethics. He first encountered the rigs as an undergraduate student in the late 1960s when he was working as a commercial fisherman and collected fish off the rigs for a public aquarium, just as the platforms started to be installed. There were a lot of fish, he says. That stuck in my mind.