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In early February, a large oil slick appeared about 60 kilometers off the coast of Bintan, an island in northern Indonesia near Singapore that is popular with Western and Asian tourists.
The black sludge strip was 185 kilometers long, more than the distance from London to Birmingham, and about 2 kilometers wide at its widest point. He fell behind the ship in a way that appeared to be the result of intentional sinking.
The oil slick was one of more than 2,700 identified by researchers globally over the past three years that were emitted by passing ships, using satellite images and artificial intelligence to track the pollution.
Until recently, there was little understanding outside the shipping world about the scale of dumping, as it is almost impossible to monitor comprehensively.
About 500 of these incidents occurred in Indonesian waters, making the archipelago most affected by oil spills. The country's territorial waters are the sixth largest globally but host some of the busiest shipping lanes.
There are a number of ways in which ships accumulate oil-contaminated waste. Cheap fuel is filtered before being fed into engines, causing residual sludge to build up, or oil leaking from the engine can build up in the chassis. Oil tankers may also wash cargo tanks between loads, or fill empty tanks with ballast, producing oily water that needs to be disposed of.
Since 1983, an IMO convention has prohibited ships from releasing any liquid containing more than 15 parts per million of oil into the sea, and they must pay to unload anything else at ports equipped with special equipment to dispose of the oil.
Retired U.S. Coast Guard Admiral Fred Kenney, a former legal director for the International Maritime Organization, said the agreement had led to “tremendous improvement” in many areas, but today's blemishes are partly because some coastal states did not have the resources or capacity to enforce. Convention. rules.
He said the flag state, where the ship is registered, is responsible for enforcement, but it also relies on the coastal state, where the spill occurs, to monitor and report pollution in the seas.
“If unscrupulous ship crews and owners think they can get away with dumping oil in certain parts of the world, they will,” Kenny said.
Satellite and computer technology is helping pinpoint those responsible for pollution that remains “chronic” in some parts of the world, said John Amos, CEO of SkyTruth, a nonprofit that has analyzed data provided by government and space research satellites. Private corporate partnerships. “Until now this problem has been well hidden,” he said.
However, the data likely represents only a small percentage of the problem, based on a 15% sample of available global satellite images scanned and then reviewed by SkyTruth researchers. The images are taken every six to 12 days and do not cover the entire world's oceans.
For 40 of the spots tracked in Southeast Asia, SkyTruth has identified a registration number for the ship most likely responsible. Research conducted by the Financial Times into a global registry found that most of these companies were registered in Southeast Asian countries, and six of them were registered in Panama. The Panamanian Maritime Authority did not respond to inquiries.
For three of the ship numbers identified, the shipowner was listed as Pertamina, the shipping arm of Indonesia's state-owned oil company. Pertamina did not respond to a request for comment.
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In a 2022 paper, Indonesian researchers highlighted how the picturesque Bintan area, located in a busy shipping lane a short distance from Singapore's main port, was severely affected by black sludge. She added that fishing communities have been disrupted and tourist numbers have declined, although the coronavirus pandemic has obscured this scope.
Amos said his organization's computer model, which scans thousands of satellite images for patterns to detect spots, will make it easier to track down those responsible in real time in the future.
Nowadays, the publicly available satellite images they rely on do not cover the high seas, leaving those vital areas exposed for bad actors to treat as a dumping ground.
But he said a treaty signed by governments around the world last year to create marine protected areas on the high seas meant that “people are going to start asking what's going on out there.”
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