By Nilo Tabrizy, Catherine Cartier and Jonathan Saul
Aug 14 (Reuters) - Two slicks have appeared in Iranian waters, satellite imagery and video verified by Reuters show, as tit-for-tat attacks on oil tankers and other vessels by Iran and the United States spark concerns about environmental damage to the Gulf.
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.
NEAR DOLPHIN-SHAPED ISLAND
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 Reuters.
"This is the biggest one that I've seen in recent months, really since the conflict between Iran and the U.S. 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 100 km 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.
DRY BULK CARRIER WAS ATTACKED
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 Reuters.
A spokesperson for Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Esmaeil Baqaei, 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".
Reuters could not independently confirm the cause of either slick nor identify the substances involved.
A source involved in the salvage operation for the Minoan Pioneer, who declined to be identified due to the sensitivity of matter, told Reuters on Friday that a tugboat dispatched to secure the grounded vessel could not approach it due to issues related to obtaining permission from Iranian authorities.
The Iranian Mission in Geneva did not respond to a Reuters request for immediate comment.
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."
(Reporting by Nilo Tabrizy and Jonathan Saul in London and Catherine Cartier in Winston-Salem, North Carolina and Renee Maltezou in Athens; additional reporting by Emily Giles; editing by Jason Neely)
