After some intense onshore training and preparation, the history department's Professor Tyler Priest took a trip this month to Shell’s Mars and Olympus platforms, tethered to the seafloor in 3,000 feet of water in the Gulf. 

After building a website documenting the history of oil development in this basin, “Shell Oil’s Deepwater Mission to Mars,” he was finally able to make the trip to visit the platforms. Mars just celebrated its 30th year of production and in April became the first platform in the Gulf to reach 1 billion barrels of cumulative production. The Olympus platform is younger, just being installed in 2014.
 
He got a full tour of each platform and gave a talk on Shell’s offshore history to workers on both. The operations manager at Mars even displayed the Tigerhawk on the galley monitor to mark the occasion and welcome him aboard.