LONDON: Satellite images released this week reveal the shocking scale of oil spills in and around the Gulf caused by attacks on tankers since the Iran war began at the end of February. The cost, say experts, is devastating — to fisheries, delicate marine environments and vulnerable species, economies reliant on tourism and, potentially, freshwater supplies dependent on coastal desalination plants. More than 130 vessels are known to have been attacked in the Gulf and the Gulf of Oman since the Iran war began. Yet the true cost of the war at sea has not been fully appreciated. Now Greenpeace, in collaboration with maritime tracking organization Kpler, has released data showing that since the conflict began on Feb. 28, no fewer than 540 oil slicks have been identified in the region. An interactive map shows an almost continuous slick of oil running up the Gulf coast of the UAE from Dubai, around through the Strait of Hormuz and down the shores of Oman, as far south as Muscat. “We want to highlight the accumulation of the really grave pollution that we are seeing in the Strait of Hormuz and the Gulf, because this is quite frankly an environmental disaster in the making,” Nina Noelle, an expert on environmental disaster relief at Greenpeace, told Arab News. “We wanted to showcase just how bad this is, to show how much oil has been spilled over the past months in such a highly sensitive ecosystem.” It is not possible to estimate exactly how much oil has been spilled. But Greenpeace says that the slicks have affected roughly 20,000 sq. km of sea — an area roughly a quarter of the size of the entire UAE. As of Nov. 3, most of the oil remains offshore — but wind and tides can change that quickly. That became clear on Monday, when the UAE city of Khor Fakkan, in the emirate of Sharjah on the Gulf of Oman, announced it was closing the popular Al-Luluyah beach after an oil spill had been detected offshore. The city authorities did not say where the oil had come from. But on Saturday, UKMTO, the UK Royal Navy’s security monitoring service in the Gulf, had issued a notice to shipping warning of “an incident involving a bulk carrier and military forces in the Gulf of Oman, approximately 18 nautical miles east of Khor Fakkan.” Since then, UKMTO has issued a further six warnings of incidents in the Gulf or off Oman, including reported strikes on at least two tankers. Some of the biggest concentrations of oil are off the UAE’s northern emirates, where tourist beaches have already been affected. Another vast patch of oil is concentrated in the Gulf midway between Iran and the UAE. There was some good news this week. The northern UAE emirate of Ras Al-Khaimah announced it was reopening seven public and resort beaches that had been closed for almost three weeks. All public beaches in RAK, “the UAE’s Nature Emirate,” and others on the Gulf in the neighboring emirates of Umm Al-Quwain and Sharjah, were closed on Oct. 24 following a spill of oil from the tanker Gem 2, which had been hit in a drone attack 13 nautical miles west of the UAE coastline in early October. The beaches in Umm Al-Quwain and Sharjah, however, remain closed. So far, there have been no reports of oil reaching beaches further south, in Dubai or Abu Dhabi. But the latest data reveal that this one spill, with its widespread impact on three of the UAE’s emirates, is just the tip of a pollution disaster that threatens to have long-lasting environmental and economic impacts throughout the Gulf. Gulf states have been working to reassure overseas visitors that travel to the region is safe.According to Euromonitor International, in 2025 Dubai welcomed a near-record 19.6 million visitors. The war, however, has seen visitor numbers fall dramatically. Hotel groups that had forecast occupancy above 80 percent for March 2026 “saw actual levels fall to around 20 percent by April, while some hotels dropped below 10 percent or closed temporarily.” On March 4, four days after the US and Israel began the war with Iran, market research company Oxford Economics predicted that, if the war lasted two months, Gulf states would suffer the loss of about 33 million visitors in 2026, hitting economies to the tune of about $56 billion. GCC countries, in particular the UAE, “will see the largest losses, as they are the largest destinations in the region which have previously relied on perceptions of safety and stability,” it said. The war has now been going on for more than eight months. In 2025, tourism generated more than $130 billion for Gulf economies. But a month after the war began in February, the World Travel and Tourism Council estimated the region was losing $600 million a day in tourism revenue. At a meeting in Manama in September, the six states of the GCC approved a joint tourism recovery plan, under which tourists would be incentivized to visit several Gulf countries in one vacation. In an interview with Fortune magazine on Nov. 4, Bahrain’s tourism minister, Fatima bint Jaffar Al-Sairafi, said Gulf states had been left “very disheartened” by the impact of the Iranian attacks on tourism, but a global campaign “to promote our countries in terms of multi-destination itineraries was now close to launch.” For countries such as the UAE, tourism is the lifeblood of the economy. Photographs of once-golden beaches covered in oil will do nothing to help reverse the collapse in tourist numbers that followed the start of the Iran war. But, as the region’s bounce-back after the COVID-19 pandemic showed, tourism will eventually recover. Less certain is the fate of a precious but extremely delicate marine environment, home to many vulnerable species. A paper published in the journal Springer Nature in May highlighted the environmental risks posed by armed conflict to the marine environment of the Gulf. The authors, including biologists from the University of Oxford, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia and the Mubadala Arabian Center for Climate and Environmental Sciences at New York University Abu Dhabi, stressed that the Gulf, and many of the marine species that live in it, is particularly vulnerable to pollution. A shallow, enclosed sea with limited “turnover” of water in and out of the Strait of Hormuz, it is home to “ecologically and economically important habitats, including coral reefs, seagrass beds, mangrove stands, salt marshes, mudflats and extensive soft-sediment communities.” The combined effect of these diverse habitats is to “stabilize shorelines, maintain biodiversity, and provide nursery grounds for fish and invertebrates, thereby sustaining fisheries of great economic importance.” But because of the extreme natural conditions in the shallow waters of the Gulf — including sea-surface temperatures that can exceed 35 degrees Celsius in the summer, very high salinity and unusually low levels of oxygen — “organisms that persist under these conditions may have limited capacity to absorb additional stress ... increasing their vulnerability to conflict-related contamination.” No fewer than 35 species of fish, rays and sharks found in the Gulf and the Arabian Sea feature on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List as endangered or vulnerable, and another 15 are classified as “near threatened.” The potential environmental consequences of the unprecedented pollution in the Gulf and the Arabian Sea, said Noelle, “are very serious and vary according to where the pollution is. “There are various protected areas in the Strait of Hormuz and in the Gulf with different, very sensitive ecosystems, where the oil can have devastating consequences. “In mangrove forests, for example, oil can have long-lasting consequences over decades. It suffocates the air roots of the mangrove forest and also sinks down into the sediment, potentially harming fish nurseries. “In other areas we have coral reefs, for example, that are heavily impacted, and a lot of uninhabited islands that are extremely important breeding grounds for turtles and sea birds.” Even if the war ended tomorrow, she said, the region would be faced with a vast, expensive and challenging cleanup operation, which would become ever more challenging as time passes. “It will be daunting,” she said. “Oil spills dissipate and are carried away by wind and current, and the oil goes into the sediment, which makes cleaning up after such a long time of pollution very, very difficult. “What we have been pleading for is that if an active spill is occurring in a protected area, whenever possible something should be done immediately to prevent the oil reaching coastlines. “Mangrove forests, for example, are incredibly difficult to clean up once pollution has already occurred. These are areas where you cannot go with heavy machinery. “So cleaning up is not only going to be very expensive, but also in some cases nearly impossible, especially if delayed.” One of the single largest oil slicks detected by satellite imagery is the spill from the Caroline Bezengi, a 275-meter crude oil tanker that was hit by an explosion off Yemen on June 8 and ran aground on an island off a protected area on Oman’s southern coast. Five months on, the ship is still aground and is the source of a vast oil slick extending for more than 300 km in an Omani nature reserve that is home to diverse wildlife, including Socotra cormorants, humpback whales, turtles and dolphins. On Nov. 9, Maritime Executive reported that efforts to stop oil leaking, previously hampered by strong winds and rough seas, began only about two weeks ago. Satellite imagery shows a number of vessels, including a tanker, are now in the area, preparing to salvage an estimated 650,000 barrels of crude oil still thought to be on board the ship.