| Summary: | Mexico after the explosion of BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig, the Obama administration announced it would pause offshore drilling plans in the Arctic Ocean, one of the planet’s most pristine ecosystems. 1 Hailed by environmental groups, the decision was a major setback to the oil industry, which was gearing up to tap what’s expected to be vast amounts of oil and gas lying under the Arctic’s treacherous waters, wher e sustained winds blow at 30 to 50 miles per hour, and menacing chunks of floating “pack ice, ” some hundreds of feet wide and dozens of feet thick, threaten marine traffic. With shallow-water, near-shore reserves increasingly tapped out in the Gulf of Mexico, oil companies are being forced into more challenging terrain to sustain domestic energy production. That means pushing into much deeper geology in the Gulf of Mexico—much of it more than a mile underwater—and also into ecologically fragile locations off the coast of Alaska.
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