Oil Spills News

Yesterday, Royal Dutch Shell estimated that to date 54,600 gallons of oil had spilled into the North Sea off the east coast of Scotland, spreading some 19 miles wide (30…

Approximate site of preliminarily approved drilling by Shell. Pink outline is the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). Image made with Google Earth. Less than a year and a half after…

Fifty years of oil spills in Nigeria's now infamous Ogoniland region will take up to three decades and over a billion dollars ($1 billion for just the first five years)…

On Sunday morning children swimming in the Mashiria River in the Peruvian Amazon noticed oil floating on the water. A pipeline owned by Maple Energy had ruptured in Block 31-E,…

Scientists expect that the Arctic will be fully ice-free during summer sometime during this century. Graph by: Dominiklenne. Kumi Naidoo, the head of Greenpeace, has been arrested after scaling a…

Not long ago such an image would have been impossible, but here polar bears meet a US attack submarine. US Navy Photo by: Chief Yeoman Alphonso Braggs, US-Navy. At the…

After being found guilty in February of environmental harm and ordered to pay $8.6 billion in an Ecuador court of law, Chevron this week faced another trial: this time by…

Google Earth view of location of Little Buffalo, Alberta near site of oil spill. Yellow line is the Canadian border with the US. The Canadian province of Alberta has suffered…

Nightingale Island as viewed from Google Earth. One of the world remotest communities, the UK's Tristan da Cunha archipelago, has come together to save 4,000 endangered penguins following a devastating…

Northern rockhopper penguins covered in oil. Photo by: Tristan Conservation Team of Simon Glass, Wayne Swain and Matthew Green. Courtesy of: The Tristan da Cunha Website. Disturbing photos show northern…

Yesterday the US Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement awarded Royal Dutch Shell PLC the first deep-water exploration permit since the BP disaster last year, which sent some…

Nightingale Island as viewed from Google Earth. Conservation workers have found hundreds of oiled northern rockhopper penguins (Eudyptes moseleyi) after a cargo vessel wrecked on Nightingale Island, apart of the…

An oil spill flows down Chuuntsa Creek in Oil Block 1-AB. Photo courtesy of: Amazon Watch. A new report has uncovered 90 oil spills by Pluspetrol in northern Peru's Amazon…

Every year a few baby dolphins in the Gulf don't make it and are found on the shores of the Gulf, but this year something is different. To date, 24…

Samantha Joye of the University of Georgia has seen the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico and the view wasn't pretty. Speaking at the American Association for the Advancement of…

It was the environmental legal battle that some believed would never end (and they may still be right). But today in Lago Agrio, Ecuador, after 18 years of an often-dramatic…

The view from Lazy Point. Photo courtesy of Carl Safina. Being compared—by more than one reviewer—to Henry Thoreau and Rachel Carson would make any nature writer's day. But add in…

25 years on from Greenpeace’s joint stand with New Zealand’s government against potentially environmentally devastating practices, the country is at a Crossroads The Rainbow Warrior after the bombing by French…

Below is a quick review of some of the biggest environmental stories of 2010. Climate change rears it ugly head (Hance) A streak of freak floods in the US, a…

BP’s disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico this year killed countless marine animals, but it was a boon for oil-eating bacteria. The organisms, usually quiescent deep in the…

Using satellite data from the European Space Agency, researchers estimate that over 20% of juvenile Atlantic bluefin tuna in the Gulf of Mexico were killed by the BP oil spill.…

An interview with wildlife documentarian Ryan Killackey. How do you save one of the most biologically and culturally diverse places in the world if most people have never heard of…

Researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) have detected a plume of hydrocarbons that is at least 22 miles long and more than 3,000 feet below the surface of…

BP's Gulf of Mexico disaster is officially the worst accidental oil spill on record, U.S. authorities said Monday. Scientists appointed by the Department of Energy now estimate that some 4.9…

"President Obama called it 'the worst environmental disaster America has ever faced.' So I thought I should face it and head to the Gulf"—these are the opening words on the…

For the past few months, the mainstream media has focused on the environmental and technical dimensions of the Gulf mess. While that’s certainly important, reporters have ignored a crucial aspect…

Reading articles in the newspapers recently and online, I find the media's focus is on scrutinizing BP's way of paying for the damage done when an estimated 76,934,000 gallons of…

Two oil pipelines exploded Friday in the Chinese province of Liaoning beginning China's worst oil spill; nearly a week later 400,000 gallons of oil have spread over 166 square miles,…

As I discovered in the course of researching my book, No Rain in the Amazon: How South America’s Climate Change Affects the Entire Planet (Palgrave, 2010), the oil industry has…

Oil disaster could cripple the Gulf's ecosystem services. According to a new analysis by the World Resources Institute (WRI), the many ecosystem services provided by the Gulf of Mexico will…