“There is no such thing as a ‘clean war’. Not for the unlucky humans that are drawn into it, nor for the unlucky environment in which the conflict takes place,” said Riegl.
That warning from Bernhard Riegl, a marine biologist at Nova Southeastern University, highlights the growing environmental disaster unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. Eight months into the war between the U.S. and Iran, the waterway has become a battlefield where frequent strikes on oil tankers have released persistent crude oil spills visible from space.
According to Greenpeace, there have been more than 500 instances of oil spills identified through satellite monitoring across the Gulf, the strait, and the Arabian Sea since the conflict began on 28 February. These incidents include major spills linked to attacks on vessels, as well as others detected near the time of strikes. The cumulative total of the mapped footprints for these spills is approximately 20,000 square kilometres.
“Adding together the daily mapped footprints gives a cumulative total of approximately 20,000 square kilometres – almost the size of Wales,” said Nina Noelle, a Greenpeace expert on environmental disaster relief.
The pollution threatens fragile marine ecosystems, including coral reefs, mangrove forests, and seagrass meadows. Experts note that oil can coat birds’ feathers and cover mangrove roots, preventing the trees from absorbing oxygen. Riegl, who has studied the Gulf for more than 30 years, stated that because the Gulf is shallow, the additional stress of oil contamination in already heat-stressed waters is significant.
The intensity of the conflict has fluctuated, with October recording more than 30 confirmed or reported attacks in the strait and surrounding waters. One of the most polluting incidents involved the supertanker Gem No 2, which was struck off the coast of the United Arab Emirates, leaving a slick stretching more than 21 miles.
On 11 November, the navy of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps reported that two oil tankers exploded after entering what it described as an unauthorized and unsafe southern shipping lane.
Iranian authorities released footage showing a tanker damaged at sea with flames and smoke rising from the water, while the IRGC warned that any vessel cooperating with U.S. forces and using that lane would “meet the same fate in the end.”
Wim Zwijnenburg, an environmental researcher with a Dutch peace organisation, noted that some vessels hit earlier in the year, such as two Iranian naval ships struck in March, continued leaking oil for months.
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