Prudhoe Bay offshore ice islands

Ice as a structural material. Civil engineers from MIT designed man-made islands with sloping rock walls so accreting sea ice would build up above the waterline. Cites Professor Kingery's mid-1950s ice strength research as the academic foundation.

Ice is a structural material. In the mid '50s, Professor Kingery in Ceramics had a big project to look at the strength of ice as a structural material. It didn't really become an important structural material until they started building the oil fields in Prudhoe Bay in Alaska. They built man-made islands to go out there into the ocean, 100 feet deep. They built low islands. Those islands were designed by a group of civil engineers who used to be here at MIT. They would build the islands such that as the ice started to form, the islands have nice sloping walls of rock, and the ice would just build up and be pushed up above the ocean. Ice can obviously be a structural material. Anybody who goes ice fishing knows that it can be a structural material — except for the times when it's not thick enough.

Geological externality — how surface oil seeps gave clues to subsurface reserves and produced tar sands as the volatile-stripped residue.

The example I like to give of the externality of pollution — the rules have changed over the years. I had an explosion in an oil refinery in Oil City, Pennsylvania. Anybody ever been to Oil City? It's up in the northwest corner. It's just down the river from Titusville. Anybody know what Titusville is famous for? It's where Edwin Drake discovered oil in 1856. That was the beginning of the drilling for oil. Otherwise they used to find oil bubbling up out of the ground. Anybody know where? It did occur in Texas. I used to always wonder why the Strategic Naval Petroleum Reserve, even back in 1900, was in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska. Who was drilling for oil in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska in 1900? Nobody. It was just bubbling up out of the ground. Someone knew there must be something underneath the ground if it's just bubbling up. A lot of the year it didn't bubble up in Prudhoe Bay, but they knew that there was oil on the ground.