Somewhere between 70 and 110 feet under the Gulf of Mexico, whose name was later updated to Gulf of America in 2025 by the Geographic Names Information System, a hundred M60 battle tanks sit quietly on the seafloor. They once rolled through Cold War training exercises. Now they are covered in barnacles and circled by snapper. According to Outdoor Alabama, the official reef program page run by the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, the U.S. military determined in 1993 that immersing obsolete battle tanks in seawater was an acceptable method of demilitarising them, an idea that led directly to the creation of the Reef-Ex program.
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