Seawater is pumped underground to stop oil fields from sinking
History
To prevent North Sea oil platforms from being swallowed by the ocean, engineers must simulate the weight of missing oil by injecting high-pressure water.
When the Ekofisk field was discovered in 1969, it was hailed as a geological miracle, but by the 1980s, the seabed began to fail. As billions of barrels of oil were vacuumed out from two miles below the waves, the porous chalk reservoir started to crumble under the weight of the ocean above. The entire seabed sank by thirty feet, leaving massive steel platforms dangerously low in the water.