Oil Slicks Spread Through Persian Gulf, Threatening Fragile Ecosystems
May 25, 2026Reading time: 4 minutes
The Strait of Hormuz (NASA Johnson/flickr)
As peace talks drag on and the American-Israeli war against Iran enters its fourth month, environmental advocates are urging attention to yet another bitter consequence of dropping bombs on the world’s largest centre of fossil fuel production: ecosystem-ravaging oil slicks.
Satellite imagery confirms that marine environments are being poisoned by oil leaking from fossil fuel infrastructure destroyed or compromised by the fighting. This latest threat follows the toxic “
black rain” that blanketed Tehran after Israel bombed four fuel depots near the Iranian capital in March.
Now, oil slicks from early April attacks on infrastructure on the island of Lavan, some 250 kilometres west of the Strait of Hormuz, have reached Shidvar—a tiny coral island nature reserve that shelters endangered sea turtles and dolphins, and serves as a breeding ground for tens of thousands of migratory seabirds.
Videos posted to social media show “large dark ribbons of oil snaking along the island’s pristine white sand beaches,”
reports The New York Times, which broke the news of Shidvar’s emergence as yet more collateral damage in the conflict.
By last month, CNN
said the oil slicks were visible from space.
The oil spills coincide with breeding season for many birds and nesting season for the island’s turtles.
The Persian Gulf’s latest encounter with
conflict-driven oil slicks began just hours after the war began Feb. 28, with a U.S.
warplane attack on IRIS Shahid Bagheri, a 240-metre Iranian drone carrier that was
reportedly docked near the Bandar Abbas Naval Harbor in the Strait.
Bombed again on March 6, the vessel likely had “significant” fuel on board, given its reported range of 22,000 nautical miles (40,750 kilometres) and ability to go an entire year without refuelling, The Guardian
wrote at the time.
Since then, it has been grounded in shallow water near Iran’s Qeshm Island, home to the Hara Biosphere Reserve, a mangrove-filled wetland that provides vital habitat to flamingos, herons, egrets, and pelicans, as well as sea snakes and turtles. The waters around Qeshm, the Persian Gulf’s largest island, also sustain many kinds of fish and crustaceans that provide local communities with sustenance and work.
Satellite images from March 18 show a kilometres-long plume of bunker fuel from the Shahid Bagheri moving west towards the Hara Reserve.
With the fate of the reserve still uncertain, the United Nations is calling for a permanent global network to monitor environmental disasters in conflict zones using very-high resolution satellite imagery.
“Ecologically catastrophic in potential, geographically remote, and unfolding in a conflict zone where no cleanup crews can yet reach,” the Hara wetland crisis proves the urgent need for such a system,
writes the UN.
Compounding all the dangers posed by the bombing of oil and gas infrastructure and leakages into nearby ecosystems is a frequent fog of uncertainty over who may be to blame for a particular disaster.
Just who is responsible for the attacks on Lavan Island remains unclear, for example, with Iran blaming unnamed “enemies” for the assault, CNN
reported in a late April post.
The causes of two large oil slicks that appeared in the waters surrounding the Kharg Island oil export facility are also unconfirmed. The first appeared on satellite images on May 6, the second on May 16.
Potential causes of the spills include a crude oil leak from one of the large tankers moored off Kharg Island at the time, or a rupture in a decades-old undersea pipeline that connects the export facility to the Abuzar oil field,
reports the New York Times.
Others have speculated—without evidence, notes the Times—that the slick might be evidence that Kharg Island is being forced to discharge oil that it has no room to store, with exports largely suspended since the end of February.
“The naval blockade has likely pushed Iran’s oil system into a dangerous state,” Nima Shokri, professor at the school of civil and environmental engineering at the Hamburg University of Technology, told the Times.
Further compounding all the harm is Iran’s own refusal to acknowledge the environmental cataclysm arriving on the crest of each oil-tipped wave. As of May 19, the Iranian government had yet to publicly acknowledge Shidvar Island’s condition,
reported The Associated Press.
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Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images
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