Environment: Dead Sea in the Making

By MICHAEL D. LEMONICK.

Another full-fledged war began last week, complete with its own heavy weapons, intelligence reports and international team of experts on strategy and tactics. This one was against an enemy no less redoubtable than Saddam's army: an oil slick estimated at 80 km (50 miles) long and 19 km (12 miles) wide that is breaking into pieces as it spreads down the Persian Gulf, its consistency like that of melted chocolate.

An estimated 1.1 billion liters (294 million gal.) of crude oil had escaped from Kuwait's Sea Island terminal before allied bombing raids on pumps feeding the facility reduced the torrent to a trickle. That makes the spill by far the largest ever, not 12 times the size of the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster, as originally thought, but 27 times as large. And that does not include oil that began gushing last week from a second spill farther north. The magnitude of the mess is such that "it can't be cleaned up," says Jim Rhodes, of ABASCO, a maker of cleanup equipment based in Houston.

Saddam Hussein may have engineered the spill to foil any allied plans for an amphibious invasion, but he was also probably trying to shut down seaside desalination plants that provide much of the fresh water for Saudi Arabia's Eastern province. Another target may have been Saudi power stations and oil refineries, which rely on seawater for cooling. Saddam's action will not prevent an invasion, says the Pentagon, but temporary shutdowns of plants and refineries seem inevitable.

The danger is vastly greater, though, for the billions of creatures that inhabit the Persian Gulf. The gulf waters, shores and islands are dotted with coral reefs, mangrove swamps and beds of sea grass and algae, brimming with birds, sea turtles, fish and marine mammals. This complex ecosystem, already pushed to the limits of survival by years of pollution, is now threatened with total collapse by the inexorable spread of the smothering, toxic oil.

Early on, experts might have blunted the slick's destructive power by burning off some of the oil, using chemical dispersants to break it up and removing more with surface-skimming devices deployed from boats. But the best they could hope for in a war zone was to protect a few key spots. "We learned in the Exxon Valdez cleanup that you can't control the oil but you can exclude it from a small area," says Randy Bayliss, a consultant involved in the Alaskan effort.

Workers last week began placing miles of plastic booms around the desalination facilities. Because petroleum generally floats on water, such booms, which extend up to 1 m (3 ft.) below the surface, can contain a slick. The next step is to put skimming equipment inside the booms and begin scooping up the oil, either with vacuuming devices or by drawing oil-absorbent plastic ropes through it and wringing them out. Some of the crude can be salvaged as kerosene.

Such techniques work best during the early days of a spill, before the crude begins to separate. Unfortunately, by the time a U.S. oil-spill assessment team arrived on the scene, the more volatile components of the oil had evaporated, leaving heavier chemicals that were whipped by waves into a thick water-oil "mousse" or turned into tar balls, which sink.

The spilled Kuwaiti oil is relatively light, so the separation process occurs quickly. The resulting small globules can more easily infiltrate the desalination plants' intake pipes, 5 m (16 ft.) below the surface. Even tiny amounts of oil would affect the smell and taste of the water, and greater amounts could damage the desalination equipment.

The plants will therefore probably be shut at the first hint of contamination, an event that would be likely to trigger severe water rationing. The Jubail plant alone provides 80% of Riyadh's drinking water, while the Azziziyah plant in al-Khobar serves half a million residents of the Eastern province. Transporting desalinated water from the Red Sea or digging new wells and converting brackish groundwater to sweet water would be time- consuming alternatives.

There was little hope that the oil would stay offshore. For most of last week winds and currents drove the slick into Saudi coastal waters at a rate of 16 km (10 miles) a day. Though strong winds from the south intervened over the weekend to push the oil away, granting the Saudis a few more days to mount defenses against it, the slick was expected to reach Jubail sometime this week. From there it is expected to move on to the shore of the heavily populated Dhahran-al-Khobar area.

Ecologists say this particular stretch of the planet is extraordinarily sensitive to upheaval. The water is very salty, and temperatures vary widely from one season to another. As a result, indigenous animals and plants are finely attuned to specialized conditions. The Persian Gulf is also isolated, with only one narrow outlet -- the Strait of Hormuz, just 55 km (34 miles) across. "It takes three to five years for the water to be flushed out," says Abdul Aziz Abu Zinada, Secretary General of the Saudi National Commission for Wildlife Conservation and Development. By contrast, Prince William Sound, site of the Exxon Valdez accident, is cleansed every 28 days.

The gulf differs from the sound in other ways as well. It averages only 35 m (110 ft.) deep -- about one-third the depth of the sound, so there is less water to dilute the oil. The gently sloping shoreline provides flat beds for mangroves and sea grass. Also, "the fetch of the waves is not high," says $ John Grainger, a British scientist working with the NCWCD, "so wave action is not very cleansing."

Much of the gulf's rich sea life is dependent on mud flats, many of which lie right in the oil slick's path. They are home to hordes of snails that feed on algae. Young fish eat the debris produced by the roots of mangroves, which grow in the mud, while nearby sea-grass beds serve as shrimp nurseries. Says Grainger: "The algal stretches, coral reefs and sea grass are the major driving forces of the gulf ecosystem."

Coral reefs, which teem with sea life, will probably die back as much as 3 m (10 ft.) below the surface. "It could be tens of years if not centuries before some of the reefs come back," says Roger McManus, president of the Center for Marine Conservation. Many of the creatures within the reefs -- starfish, shrimp, lobsters, urchins, sea snakes and a variety of fish -- would also be sacrificed.

Birds, including terns, sandpipers, curlews, ducks and cormorants, will be among the most immediate and visible victims of the spill. Their plumage becomes coated with oil, depriving them of the ability to regulate their body temperature. Hundreds of Saudis in the Jubail area have volunteered to wash the oil off birds. But even if some birds are cleaned, many will die from eating contaminated mollusks and worms in the mud flats.

Commercially important fish such as tuna, mackerel and sardines are threatened as well, as are hawksbill and green turtles. Sea mammals are also vulnerable, including dolphins, whales and dugongs, an endangered species similar to Florida's manatees. Only about 7,000 of these docile, 1.5-ton vegetarians are in the gulf, one of the world's largest populations.

Nature has a way of confounding even experts' predictions. After all, Prince William Sound recovered from the Exxon Valdez disaster more quickly than expected. But no one has ever seen a spill of this size, and no one can say that "eco-terrorism" in the gulf is over. The Iraqis could, in the words of an American engineer, let "rivers of oil run into the sea." Saudi and U.S. forces would try to stop that, but it may already be too late to prevent the teeming gulf from becoming a dead sea.

With reporting by Ted Gup/Washington and Lara Marlowe/Dhahran