Ixtoc I oil spill
1979-80 industrial disaster in the Gulf of Mexico
Ixtoc I was an exploratory oil well being drilled by the semi-submersible drilling rig Sedco 135 in the Bay of Campeche of the Gulf of Mexico, about 100 km (62 mi) northwest of Ciudad del Carmen, Campeche in waters 50 m (164 ft) deep. On 3 June 1979, Ixtoc I suffered a well blowout resulting in the largest oil spill in history at its time. To-date, it remains the second largest marine oil spill in history after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
Accident
Mexico's state-owned oil company Pemex (Petróleos Mexicanos) was drilling a 3 km (1.9 mi) deep oil well when the drilling rig Sedco 135 lost drilling mud circulation.
In modern rotary drilling, mud is circulated down the drillpipe and back up the wellbore to the surface. The goal is to equalize the pressure through the shaft and to monitor the returning mud for gas. Without the counter-pressure provided by the circulating mud, the pressure in the formation allowed oil to fill the well column, blowing out the well. The oil caught fire, and Sedco 135 was extensively burned then scuttled.
At the time of the accident, Sedco 135 was drilling at a depth of about 3,600 metres (11,800 ft) below the seafloor. The day before Ixtoc suffered the blowout and resulting fire that caused her to sink, the drill bit hit a region of soft strata.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q975050. Authority coordinates are 19.414, -92.331. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1979.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ixtoc I oil spill” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.