Image: Sentinel-1 captures Tobago oil spill

Before and after satellite images from the Copernicus Sentinel-1 mission show the scale of the oil spill that occurred off the shores of Trinidad and Tobago's coastline earlier this week. The ship, identified as The Gulfstream, ...

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Oil spill

An oil spill is the release of a liquid petroleum hydrocarbon into the environment due to human activity, and is a form of pollution. The term often refers to marine oil spills, where oil is released into the ocean or coastal waters. The oil may be a variety of materials, including crude oil, refined petroleum products (such as gasoline or diesel fuel) or by-products, ships' bunkers, oily refuse or oil mixed in waste. Spills take months or even years to clean up.

Oil is also released into the environment from natural geologic seeps on the sea floor. Most human-made oil pollution comes from land-based activity, but public attention and regulation has tended to focus most sharply on seagoing oil tankers.

This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA