Business: Looking for Oil Eldorados

The search for new energy pushes into Amazon jungles and Antarctic ice

Hundreds of feet below the thick Antarctic ice, fully submerged oil pumping stations sit on the floor of the Weddell Sea. Onshore, battered by bitter cold and shrieking winds, oilworkers control the steady stream of rich, black crude that flows from the underwater wells through pipelines and into coastal storage tanks. Science fiction? Yes—at least for the moment. But later this year Japan and West Germany will begin the first serious drilling for oil in Antarctica, a continent that most geologists believe...

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