I found it relatively difficult to find anything concrete on this topic, so I decided to look at the Persian Gulf for inspiration. I decided to look at the Persian Gulf, since Saudi Arabia has a share in the coast and waters of the Gulf, but has not itself experienced a war in some time now and the topic is war related due to Kuwait, Iraq and Iran.
I found this article on an Iranian news and culture journal, at http://www.iranian.ws/cgi-bin/iran_news/exec/view.cgi/2/2181, which talked about the pollution in the Persian Gulf. It said that there was “The world largest oil spill, estimated 8 million barrels” (approx 336 million gallons), which made the want to look into that. According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_War_oil_spill) the spill was estimated to be somewhere between 42 to 462 million gallons, which is a lot of oil. Then again, it’s not that much, if one takes into consideration hat, according to the CIA factbook, in 2007 the world produced 85,5 million barrels of oil PER DAY. That makes it around 310 billion barrels per year, if I am not wrong in my calculations!
Anyway, such a major spillage has had never happened in the world – the closest one to this one was in 1979/80 in the Gulf of Mexico and it had somewhere between 454,000 to 480,000 tons of crude oil, while the “Gulf War oil spill” had 780,000-1,500,000 tons of crude oil.
Coming back to the original article, this is what it said about the oil spill:
“Saudi Arabia had the worst damage. Because the animals and plants of the seafloor are the basis of the food chain, damage to the shoreline consequences for the whole shallow- water ecosystem.
The impact of the damage affected the multimillion-dollar Saudi fisheries industry and surrounding area including Medina al Jubayl. The spill threatened industrial facilities in Al Jubayl . The greatest pollution was experienced in Abu Ali Island. The large number of marine birds, such as grebes, cormorants, and auks were killed.
Beaches along the entire Al Jubayl coastline were covered with tar balls and oil. The exploding and burning of 700 miles oil wells in Kuwait created staggering levels of atmospheric pollution.”
Obviously, the oil spill had rather direct impact on Saudi Arabia’s environment (and all of the nations of the Persian Gulf) and was definitely related to the war in Iraq and Kuwait at that point.
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It's crazy to think about how much larger this spill was than the Exxon Oil Spill here in Alaska. Yet, when we think of oil spills, the Alaskan one is the one that first comes to mind. It really makes you think about how we prioritize American events for the news here. To some point this is understandable, but I feel like we should spend more energy acknowleging what is going on in the rest of the world.
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