BP's Macondo oil and gas well was drilled in an area of the
deepwater Gulf of Mexico that was prone to shallow earthquakes
and whose rock formations were the fragile remains of a
landslide of rubble that occurred after the end of the last Ice
Age, a Scottish geoscience professor testified Monday. Andrew
Hurst, who teaches production geoscience at Aberdeen University
in Scotland, worked as a geologist in the petroleum industry in
the 1980s, including a stint as lead geologist for Statoil, the
national oil company of Norway, at a time when it was drilling
in the Gulf of Mexico. Hurst left the oil business in the 1990s
to teach geology and to continue his research on pore pressure
in rock: how rock structures are affected by the pressure of
fluids, including water and oil, that are in the spaces within
them. His testimony on behalf of the Plaintiffs Steering
Committee representing private parties who have sued BP and its
partners and companies it hired to help drill the Macondo well
was aimed at showing that the