Photo: CNN
People already call it the "eye of fire," but if you stretch your imagination a bit, it looks more like the Eye of Sauron. That is the fictitious symbol of the fictitious Dark Lord from the fictitious Lord of the Rings. Only the thing you’re looking at in the video below this text is as real as they get.
Starting with the early hours of Friday, strange videos started surfacing online of something peculiar happening in the Gulf of Mexico, right next to an oil rig operated by Mexican state-owned petroleum company Petroleos Mexicanos, or Pemex.
The videos showed a circular and relatively large portion of water boiling in strange in orange hues, engulfed by flames that seemed to rise from beneath, with the oil rig not far away from it. Around the pool of fire, several ships spit water at the… burning water, in the hopes of putting it out.
Now, we’ve seen our share of strange images with oil rigs, water, and fire, but we must say we’ve never ever seen anything like this.
The incident is relatively fresh, so we don’t have all the information yet, but what we do know so far is that an underwater pipeline that links the platform to land was somehow affected by a leak, and some undisclosed contents got spilled into the water.
For reasons that are yet to be determined, those contents somehow ignited, causing this incredible phenomenon to occur.
According to Pemex, the fire that followed the leak means nothing harmful got spilled into the ocean. Responders sent to the scene were able to eventually put the fire out (it took them about five hours), and no injuries were reported so far.
An investigation into these events will of course follow, and we’ll update this story as soon as we know more.
The videos showed a circular and relatively large portion of water boiling in strange in orange hues, engulfed by flames that seemed to rise from beneath, with the oil rig not far away from it. Around the pool of fire, several ships spit water at the… burning water, in the hopes of putting it out.
Now, we’ve seen our share of strange images with oil rigs, water, and fire, but we must say we’ve never ever seen anything like this.
The incident is relatively fresh, so we don’t have all the information yet, but what we do know so far is that an underwater pipeline that links the platform to land was somehow affected by a leak, and some undisclosed contents got spilled into the water.
For reasons that are yet to be determined, those contents somehow ignited, causing this incredible phenomenon to occur.
According to Pemex, the fire that followed the leak means nothing harmful got spilled into the ocean. Responders sent to the scene were able to eventually put the fire out (it took them about five hours), and no injuries were reported so far.
An investigation into these events will of course follow, and we’ll update this story as soon as we know more.
A blaze on the surface of the Gulf of Mexico resembling a large "eye of fire" has been brought under control, according to Mexico's state oil company Pemex. https://t.co/1eLHieAyWJ pic.twitter.com/ZP7OtC8QSE
— CNN (@CNN) July 3, 2021
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