Where did the first major oil spill occur?
The first major oil spill occurred during World War II (1939-45), between January and June of 1942. German U-boat attacks on tankers off the East Coast of the United States spilled 590,000 tons of oil. The first major commercial oil spill occurred on March 18, 1967, when the tanker Torrey Canyon ran aground on the Seven Stones Shoal off the coast of Cornwall, England. The tanker spilled 830,000 barrels (119,000 tons) of Kuwaiti oil into the sea. On January 25, 1991, during the Gulf War, almost 1.5 million tons of oil was deliberately dumped from Sea Island into the Persian Gulf. Another major spill occurred in Russia in October 1994, in the Komi region of the Arctic. The size of that spill was reported to be as much as 2 million barrels (286,000 tons). Spills such as the aforementioned were far larger than the much-publicized Exxon…
