Major industrial accidents are often built upon years and years of ignoring safety protocols, cutting corners, and generally using a ‘fuck around and find out’ method with monstrous chemicals or poking at the friendly atom.
Then there are the times when humans torch the planet with ruthless purpose.
Today’s Moment of Science… the Gulf War Oil Spill.
Though I have- and will continue to- call the stuff prehistoric chicken goo, your oil is probably 99% velociraptor free. The formation of oil can involve one of several chemical processes. Typically though, petroleum comes from the planet slowly massaging dead zooplankton and algae deeper into layers of Earth. With the right temperature and pressure combination, the planet bakes a batch of definitely not velociraptor goo.
It’s perfectly harmless glop when it stays where mother nature left it. Buried about a mile underground, this perhaps should have been taken as a sign to leave it the fuck alone.
Oil does some pretty nasty shit when you use it “correctly.” So hosing the surface of the Earth with it like a particularly vigorous cumshot results in a bit of a fuck-up-all-life situation. Marine plant and animal life is devastated, often for generations. Air quality is impacted and respiratory distress surrounding a spill is common. Drinking water supplies are contaminated. Sales of Dawn dish soap skyrocket.
So… that oil spill that wasn’t an accident.
Things were tense between Iraq and Kuwait in the late 1980s. Iraq thought Kuwait was producing a smidge too much oil, driving prices down and hurting Iraq’s economy. During the Iran-Iraq war that went on through the better part of the Reagan administration, Kuwait had given Iraq financial assistance. Afterwards Kuwait was like “hey, about that $14 billion we gave you to fund your military?” Iraq was all “no, but we still have the military. We’ll send that instead.” Their invasion and takeover of Kuwait was over in days.
At first, not much changed. People were going about their day to day lives while Iraqi forces slowly took over around them. As Kuwait’s resistance movement started taking off, brutal crackdowns followed in lockstep. Some Kuwaitis were disappeared off to prison in Iraq under accusation of being a part of the resistance movement. Some of them have still never been located.
A coalition of 35 countries (but mostly America) joined to push Iraqi forces out of Kuwait starting on January 16th, 1991. Things started turning around quickly, but at a cost. In order to stop advancing American troops from landing on the beaches of Kuwait, Iraqi forces just dumped Kuwait’s oil into the Persian Gulf.
It’s not like they cared about the long term environmental impact on a country they were being swiftly removed from. They went hard with their scorched earth policy; on their walk of shame back to Iraq, they set around 700 oil wells ablaze. They also planted landmines around the oil fields to make extinguishing those fires just a tad more annoying.
The slick grew to over 100 miles and was five inches thick in some areas. The biggest spill in history, it’s estimated that as much as half a billion gallons of oil were dumped.
For comparison, the Exxon Valdez spilled about eleven million gallons.
Today if you go to the area, it doesn’t immediately scream ‘site of an ecological terrorist attack,’ but it’s not ‘fixed’ either. The clean up effort was hampered by, amongst other issues, the Gulf War itself. Though initial assessments found that the oil spill caused “little long term damage,” more recent studies suggest otherwise. An alarming amount of oil settled deep into the sediments of the Gulf. Though some areas have detectable levels of oil in an acceptable range, tidal flats and marshlands still have major oil contamination. Tens of thousands of birds are estimated to have died, and fishing infrastructure was damaged.
An estimated $12-38 billion worth of oil was bled from Kuwaiti reserves. The country is still dealing with the catastrophic effects of the war, the oil spill, and burning oil wells over three decades later.
This has been your Moment of Science, a little alarmed that I only found out today that this was the biggest oil spill in history.
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