In waters, satellite imagery and video verified by A potential environmental disaster is already unfolding off Oman outside of the Strait of Hormuz, where a grounded tanker, the Caroline Bezengi, is leaking Russian crude oil in a protected marine area and has created a massive slick some estimates put at 2,000 square km. The Caroline Bezengi incident has not been linked to the Iran war.
The two latest slicks are inside the Gulf. One slick has appeared off the southern tip of Qeshm Island, the large dolphin-shaped island in the Strait of Hormuz close to Iran's coast, pictures from Copernicus's Sentinel-2 satellites showed. Wim Zwijnenburg, an environmental open-source researcher at Dutch peace organisation PAX, said the dark colour in parts of the slick indicated it was heavy fuel oil, while a lighter diluted slick stretched around 160 km.
A dark, bubbling liquid was spotted washing ashore on the beaches of Suza on Qeshm Island, contrasting with the turquoise water surrounding it, in a video posted on August 11 and verified by "This is the biggest one that I've seen in recent months, really since the conflict between Iran and the US began," said John Amos, CEO of SkyTruth, which uses satellite imagery to detect oil spills, calling it a "a major incident".
A second slick was spotted near the smaller Sirri Island in the centre of the Gulf about 100km southwest of Qeshm and home to some Iranian offshore oil and gas production, satellite showed. The satellite imagery of Qeshm Island was taken on August 10 and that of Sirri Island on August 13. The Qeshm Island slick likely stemmed from a leak from the Minoan Pioneer, a Liberia-flagged dry bulk ship, said Samir Madani, co-founder of monitoring service TankerTrackers.com.
The Minoan Pioneer was hit by an unknown projectile close to Oman's coast in a suspected Iranian attack while sailing through the Strait of Hormuz on August 3 and one seafarer went missing, maritime security sources said. The same leak likely also affected Qeshm Island, one maritime security source told A spokesperson for Iran's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Esmaeil Baghaei, said in a post on X that oil pollution from the Gulf had reached Qeshm Island and that preliminary evidence "indicates a foreign bulk carrier as the source".
A source involved in the salvage operation for the Minoan Pioneer, who declined to be identified due to the sensitivity of matter, told The Iranian Mission in Geneva did not respond to a The conflict in the region had complicated efforts to assess and clean up spills in the Gulf, said Brian Barnes, a satellite oceanographer and research assistant professor at the University of South Florida.
"The longer that the oil is leaking into an environment, the more it can spread out and cause damage to ecosystems, coastlines.".