Three oiled rockhopper penguins on the Tristan da Cunha island chain. Thousands of endangered penguins have been coated with oil after a cargo ship ran aground and broke up on a remote British South Atlantic territory.
More than 800 tons of fuel oil has leaked from the Maltese-registered ship, which ran aground on Nightingale Island, part of the Tristan da Cunha archipelago, a British territory, early in the morning of March 16, local officials said. All 22 crew members of the M.S. Oliva were rescued.
"The scene at Nightingale is dreadful, as there is an oil slick encircling the island," Trevor Glass, a local conservation officer, said in a statement.
The ship has broken in half and an additional 800 tons of fuel oil is believed to be leaking from the front section of the hull, said a spokeswoman with the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, a British-based conservation group monitoring the situation.
The Tristan Da Cunha archipelago lies about 1,700 miles from the nearest land, in South Africa, making it the most remote inhabited island group in the world. The islands are rich in life and are home to about 200,000 penguins, including nearly half of the world's population of northern rockhopper penguins, an endangered species whose population has plunged in recent decades for unknown reasons.
Jay Holcomb, the director emeritus of the International Bird Rescue Research Center, a bird conservation group that responds to oil spills, said in a posting on the group's Web site that about 20,000 rockhopper penguins had been "confirmed oiled." Images from the island showed large groups of penguins, which have distinctive spiky crests, coated in oil. "Many of the birds have been oiled for over a week, which limits their chances of survival," Mr. Holcomb wrote.
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