In 1972, off the coast of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, a project launched with genuine optimism and the full backing of the United States Army Corps of Engineers. The idea was to sink approximately two million used tires into the Atlantic Ocean, creating an artificial reef that would expand marine habitat and relieve pressure on nearby natural reefs. Goodyear donated tires. The Navy assisted with logistics. Volunteers participated. It was covered as a conservation success story before a single fish had moved in.
The project was called Osborne Reef, named for the contractor who organized it. The tires were bundled together with steel clips and nylon rope and dropped roughly a mile offshore in about 70 feet of water. The theory was sound enough on its surface: artificial reefs made from concrete and steel had worked elsewhere, and tires were durable, abundant, and free. What the planners did not fully reckon with was what tires actually are and how the ocean would treat them over decades.
Why the Tires Never Became a Reef
Coral needs a stable, hard substrate to attach and grow. Tires are not stable in ocean conditions. They are buoyant, they shift with currents and storm surge, and they don’t provide the chemical environment that coral polyps need to colonize a surface. Researchers who studied Osborne Reef in subsequent decades found almost no coral growth on the tires themselves. The reef never materialized in any meaningful ecological sense. What happened instead was considerably worse.
The steel clips and nylon rope that held the tire bundles together corroded and degraded over time. Once the bundling failed, individual tires began to scatter across the seafloor. Hurricanes accelerated the process. Hurricane Frances and Hurricane Jeanne, both in 2004, sent tires tumbling across adjacent natural reef systems and onto beaches. The tires abraded and smothered the living coral they made contact with, causing damage that decades of coral growth would struggle to recover from…