Then bad welding on production manifolds made by FMC Technologies (weakened by months sitting unattended on the seafloor) led to leaks.

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Even farther afield is "The Abyss, " a sci-fi underwater adventure that takes place on a high-tech drilling rig that sits on the seafloor.

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Hurricane Katrina had turned Mars into a pile of steel spaghetti, dumped its 100-ton derrick under 3, 000 feet of water and mangled pipelines on the seafloor.

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Linked to GPS devices and sonar positioning beacons on the seafloor, the thrusters can keep the ship in a steady position even in 95mph winds.

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Video shot by the robotic submarines (a.k.a. remote operated vehicles or ROVs) seems to indicate that oil is leaking from three spots in a pipe that is laying on the seafloor.

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The primary culprit behind the explosion appears to be the blowout preventer, a two-story-tall stack of valves on the seafloor that was built by Cameron in 2001 and designed to guillotine shut an out-of-control well.

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Although they are sometimes produced by landslides on the seafloor, significant tsunamis are typically created by subduction earthquakes, when one massive oceanic plate suddenly lurches deeper beneath another plate, shoving up a huge section of the seafloor.

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The design of the new observatory is based in part on two larger networks of seafloor monitors off the coast of British Columbia's Victoria Island, named VENUS and NEPTUNE.

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Finally, as the lights from his Deepsea Challenger submersible set the seafloor aglow, Cameron came to rest at one of the most isolated spots on the planet.

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