Strait of Hormuz attacks spill oil into Persian Gulf

A dark, muddied patch of blue, incongruent with the rest of the ocean; a winding thread of silvery white; a reflective metallic sheen — these are some of the telltale signs on a satellite image that oil may be leaking into the water.

Experts have identified these and many other visual signatures in the Strait of Hormuz , leading them to conclude that there's an environmental crisis playing out amid the US-Iran war , as tankers are struck by missiles, set on fire or sunk.

One recent example: In June, a Russian tanker carrying about 800,000 barrels of oil stranded off the coast of Oman, causing a major spill.

Earlier in the war, there were as many as 85 large oil-laden tankers stuck in the Strait — that number has since dropped to 13, according to Greenpeace. Each stranded tanker, plus every other vessel trying to move through the waterway, poses a distinct risk for attack and thus a spill. Since the start of the war, the environmental organization has used satellite imagery to track more than 100 spills.

There are likely several other spills that we don't know of, amid widespread GPS spoofing in the region that causes ships to broadcast false positions. Greenpeace released a report this week calling the situation an "ecological catastrophe" and pinpointing a number of oil slicks that are extending into protected and fragile ecosystems .

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