The sea is on fire - pictures of the Mexican coast caused a sensation on social media on Friday and at the weekend.
The water actually seemed to be burning off the Yucatan Peninsula.
Twitter users spoke of an "eye of fire" or associated the flames with the lava of a volcano.
It was a gas leak in an underwater pipeline.
The fire was already extinguished on Friday, said the state-owned raw materials company Pemex.
The flames were seen near an oil rig on the surface of the water.
The company has a history of incidents.
Lightning strikes during a storm were named as a possible cause, but this has not yet been officially confirmed.
According to Pemex, it took more than five hours for the fire to be completely extinguished with the help of nitrogen.
Nobody was injured.
The accident occurred on the southern edge of the Gulf of Mexico, where the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded off the US coast in 2010, causing one of the largest natural disasters in decades.
The Mexican raw materials authority ASEA announced that no oil had spilled into the sea.
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