Oil spills from the Iran war are visible from space

Oil in the Persian Gulf on April 2, 2026. 

Sentinel-2/European Space Agency

Multiple oil spills are visible from space after Iranian and US-Israeli strikes hit oil facilities and ships in the region, with experts warning of an impending environmental catastrophe.

Satellite images are giving an insight into destruction in the region, including to the fragile biodiversity of the Persian Gulf. Oil spilt there has the potential to affect the lives and livelihoods of people along the Gulf coastlines, as well as the region’s rich marine life.

One image, taken on April 7, shows a spill spanning more than five miles in the Strait of Hormuz near Iran’s Qeshm Island. An Iranian vessel, the Shahid Bagheri, was leaked oil in the same area after US forces hit the vessel on February 28, Greenpeace Germany spokesperson Nina Noelle told CNN.

Image taken April 7 shows oil spill near Iran's Qeshm Island. 

Sentinel-2/European Space Agency

Another image shows oil around Lavan Island after what Iranian state media called a hit “by enemies” on an oil facility near the island’s coast on April 7. Video shared on social media and geolocated by CNN also shows a large fire erupting from the Iranian oil refinery.

The hit on Lavan is a “major environmental emergency,” said Wim Zwijnenburg, a project leader at Dutch peace organization PAX, who tracks the consequences of strikes around the Gulf.

At least five locations on Lavan were damaged, with subsequent spills happening around the island and oil leaking into the sea, he told CNN. The spills are “also now reaching the Shidvar Island… which is a protected site. It’s uninhabited, but it has a range of protected species there,” he added.

Shidvar Island is a coral island in the Persian Gulf, around one mile east of Lavan Island, that is rich in wildlife, including turtles and sea birds.

Oil around Iran’s Lavan Island as seen from satellite images taken April 10. 

Sentinel-2/European Space Agency

Satellite images also show spills just off Kuwait’s coast on April 6. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said it targeted fuel and petrochemical facilities in Gulf countries, including Kuwait, that day in retaliation for an attack on a petrochemical complex in southwestern Iran.

Oil off the coast of Kuwait, as seen in images from April 6. 

Sentinel-2/European Space Agency

In the worst case scenario, these oils spills could have consequences for thousands of people, especially those living along the coast of Iran, including contaminating the fish they rely on for income and food, Zwijnenburg warned.

The spills threaten other marine life, too, such as turtles, dolphins and whales that might ingest or become trapped in the oil. They could also potentially affect the filtering systems of desalination plants, on which nearly 100 million people in the region rely for clean water.

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Kuwait oil spill

Qeshm Island oil spill

Lavan Island oil spill

At this stage, it’s hard to quantify what damage these spills may be causing, but there are fears of an ecological catastrophe, especially if more ships are hit. There are an estimated 75 large oil tankers in the Gulf, carrying a total of almost 19 billion liters of crude oil, according to data from Greenpeace Germany.

Oil spills can have huge, wide-ranging impacts, “affecting the entire ecosystem, from microorganisms to fish, birds, and marine turtles that depend on mangrove habitats,” said Greenpeace’s Noelle.

They are very hard to clean, she said, due to “structural complexity, limited accessibility and challenging working conditions,” adding that the ongoing conflict makes the prospects of gaining access to the Gulf to clean it up all but impossible.

 By

Antoinette Radford

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Billy Stockwell

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Farida Elsebai

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New experiments show Earth’s core may hold vast ‘oceans’ of an essential element for life

Scientists used a new technique to estimate the abundance of hydrogen in Earth’s core. 

Tumeggy/Science Photo Library RF/Getty Images

Picture all of Earth’s oceans, which cover about 70% of the planet and are mostly made of hydrogen. Now multiply that by nine. That may be the amount of hydrogen in Earth’s core, possibly making it the planet’s largest hydrogen reservoir, researchers recently estimated.

And nine hydrogen “oceans” is the low end of their calculation; there could be as much as 45 oceans’ worth of hydrogen locked in the core. Put another way, hydrogen may make up roughly 0.07% to 0.36% of Earth’s total core weight, scientists reported Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications. This suggests that Earth acquired most of its water — the planet’s main source of hydrogen — as the planet formed, rather than later through comet impacts that would have left water on the planet’s surface as some scientists have suggested, said lead study author Dongyang Huang, an assistant professor in the School of Earth and Space Sciences at Peking University.

“Earth’s core would store most of the water in the first million years of Earth’s history,” Huang told CNN in an email. Next in water abundance is the mantle and crust. “The surface — where life resides — contains the least,” he said.

More than 4.6 billion years ago, rocks, gas and dust around our sun collided to form a young planet. Over time, these collisions shaped Earth’s core, mantle and crust. In Earth’s deep interior and under enormous pressure, a dense, hot and fluid metal core began to churn. Made mostly of iron and nickel, it powers Earth’s protective magnetic field.

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“Hydrogen can only enter the core-forming metallic liquid if it was available during Earth’s main growth phases and participated in core formation,” said Rajdeep Dasgupta, a professor of Earth systems science in the department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences at Rice University in Texas. Dasgupta was not involved in the new research.

Studying the origin and distribution of hydrogen is key to understanding planetary formation and the evolution of life on Earth. Scientists have long wondered how much hydrogen might be buried in Earth’s molten metal engine, and have analyzed chemical interactions in iron to try to estimate the metallic core’s hydrogen reservoir. But the core is too deep for direct observation, and its high-pressure conditions are challenging to replicate in a lab.

In general, hydrogen is difficult to quantify “because it is the lightest and smallest element, meaning its quantification is beyond the capacities of routine analytical methods,” Huang said.

Low density in the core previously hinted at an abundance of hydrogen, though it was tricky for scientists to pin down the amount compared with other known core elements that were somewhat easier to measure, such as silicon and oxygen. Prior research inferred the amount of core hydrogen by using X-ray diffraction to look at the lattice structure in iron crystals, which expands more when hydrogen is present. But these interpretations varied widely, ranging from 10 parts per million by weight to 10,000 parts per million (or 0.1 oceans to more than 120 oceans), according to the study.

Observations at the atomic scale

“The technique is fundamentally different from earlier methods,” Huang said. Researchers sharpen samples into needlelike shapes with diameters of about 20 nanometers (0.0000007874 inches), then place them under finely controlled high voltage. Next, the samples’ atoms are ionized and counted one at a time, he explained.

To create the new estimate, scientists conducted experiments replicating core temperatures and pressures, using iron as a stand-in for the liquid metal core. They melted the iron with lasers in a high-pressure device called a diamond anvil cell, then directly observed hydrogen and other core elements using atom probe tomography, which captures 3D images and measures chemical composition at the atomic scale.

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This approach relies on assumptions about how atoms are arranged in Earth’s core and how silicon, oxygen and hydrogen disperse there, Huang said. Their experiments revealed how hydrogen interacted with silicon and oxygen in nanostructures as the metal cooled, with the ratio of hydrogen to silicon being roughly 1 to 1. By combining observations of these ratios in the samples with prior estimates of core silicon, the researchers were then able to approximate the amount of core hydrogen.

Weighing uncertainties

The interplay they observed between silicon, oxygen and hydrogen in iron nanostructures offers clues to how heat may have been released from the core into the mantle to begin the process of building Earth’s magnetic field, “which is indispensable for developing the Earth into a habitable place,” Huang said.

However, the scientists cautioned that more work will be required to confirm and fine-tune this estimate, as this indirect approach includes uncertainties and does not address other chemical interactions that may affect calculations of core hydrogen.

Indeed, the amount of core hydrogen could be much higher than the new estimate suggests, said Kei Hirose, a professor at the University of Tokyo’s School of Science who studies composition of Earth’s core but was not involved in the new research.

One area of uncertainty is how much hydrogen in the iron samples escaped during decompression; this loss has been documented in other studies but was not included in the new calculations. Hirose’s work previously estimated that hydrogen makes up 0.2% to 0.6% of the weight in Earth’s core, “more than this new paper proposed,” he told CNN in an email.

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If the authors’ measurements and hypothesis hold true, “it will suggest that hydrogen was delivered throughout Earth’s growth,” Dasgupta said. Gas from nebulas as well as water from comets and asteroids may have also been a source of Earth’s hydrogen, Hirose added.

 By Mindy Weisberger

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