The world's largest oil spills

Yy8d3hjUuA:

To quote from the Economist, 'Trouble on oiled waters,' April 27, 2010, "...in 1989, when the Exxon Valdez, a large oil tanker, ran into a reef off the coast of Alaska [a]round 11m gallons of oil gushed out ..." Note that the amount is 11m *gallons*, rather than barrels. At 42 US gallons per barrel means that about 262,000 barrels spilled from the Valdez. And that amount is about one third of the smallest entry on the chart.

Yy8d...etc claims that the Exxon Valdez spilled 11m BARRELS of oil. Since the very largest VLCC ships can barely hold 2m BARRELS, he seems confused. Everything you do has a risk. I am much happier living today with plentiful available energy at my fingertips than living 400 years ago when people scraped a meager existence from the land. I don't think they were happier.

Agreed about the Valdez, as it is the most notorious oil spill in (US) history, few realize it is not among the largest.

Break the back of the capitalists! Get and ride a bicycle! Stop filling their coffers!

This graph really didn't tell me anything except that there is some oil spilling going on and the war in kuwait caused a huge amount of oil to come into the sea.

If the pun was intended I apologize for my hair-splitting, but I'd say the spill pales.

It would be good to have the amount of oil leaking from the Exxon Valdez, arguably the most notorious spillth, for comparison.

An upward trend in global temperatures is what pales in comparison to oil spills and rainforest burning and being chain-levelled...

We are playing game of Brinkmanship with Nature. Although, nature is provided with huge amount of redundancy. However, we should not forget that it is not infinite.

Drill baby, drill. You betcha.

What about that Chinese tanker spill a few weeks ago?

Oh, now I have to correct myself AGAIN. "During the first Gulf war, the Iraqi army purposely destroyed tankers and oil terminals in Kuwait, releasing 500m barrels of crude."

It's THIS number that's wrong, right? That should be 500M GALLONS of crude, at most. According to Wikipedia, "estimates on the volume spilled range from 42 to 462 million gallons."

Yes, that's what's going on. The New York Times says the Persian Gulf spill was 8M barrels, which agrees approximately with the Wikipedia range.

http://www.nytimes.com/1993/03/18/world/gulf-found-to-recover-from-war-s...

No one has yet to mention the political impact of this oil spill.

Just two weeks before, the Obama administration made a surprise announcement to open up drilling off large areas of the US coast, much of it near environmentally delicate areas.

When he did so, most people understood it to be a token of exchange, necessary for any hopes in passing climate protection legislation. Environmentalists were outraged, but to the relief of (and support by) big-energy republicans, the Obama Administration accepted industry's assurances that off- shore drilling could be done safely, and in a way that would not threaten marine life and vegetation,
much less the economic livelihood of coastal regions.

Now just two weeks after Obama made that surprise announcement, this happens, the largest US environmental disaster since the Exxon Valdiz. Only this time, it happened not in some faraway place that no-one really ever goes to, nor ever notices; nay, this time it happens right off the shores of our own back yard, where we harvest much of the food we consume, where we swim, and have large economies (not to mention large ecological system).

"Protect the environment?" "This can be done safely?"
Well, now we know the answer to those questions.

This spill could not have come at a worst time for Obama, right after he climbed into bed with the Republicans .

Earth's sacred blood that took hundreds of millions of years to create...only to be wasted away in one brief moment by human err!!! >-( Have mercy! ... Do something "Green" today! AND GIVE THE PLANET PEACE! :-)

I hope things can become much better ! Obviously,preparation should be to be done before some bad things happen.

Spectacularj1,

The Exxon Valdez spilled about 11m barrels of oil - which I'd think is significant enough to warrant the #2 spot on the graph. Especially since it wasn't due to military attack, like the currently shown first & second place spills.

Let's do something really green and educate our human population about basic math and international units. Or perhaps it would be easier to just set one barrel equal to one gallon? Certainly a large international body could be set up to study the idea and influence public opinion.

Whatever the size of an oil spill, what matters is how reckless and destructive human behavior is. Natural resources are certainly finite but human stupidity seems to be not...

The worst is never certain. As far as I can remember, the 1979 PEMEX Ixtoc leak (more than 3m bbl) did not cause any damage as it was "eaten" by microanimals living in the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico before reaching the shore : shrimp fishing there was reputedly never as good as in following years. Same story in the North Sea where repeated mishaps by Statoil (as well as a tanker running ashore in the Shetlands in 1992 or 93) which caused heavy spills of (light) oil were similarly absorbed by cold but rough seas.