Huge Oil Spill Spreads in East China Sea, Stirring Environmental Fears<br />15, 2018<br />HONG KONG — An oil spill from an Iranian tanker that sank in the East China Sea is rapidly spreading, officials<br />said Tuesday, alarming environmentalists about the threat to sea and bird life in the waterway.<br />The Sanchi disaster appears to be the largest tanker spill since 1991, when an unexplained<br />detonation caused the ABT tanker to leak 260,000 tons of oil off the coast of Angola.<br />"The area is also on the migratory pathway of many marine mammals, such as humpback whale, right whale<br />and gray whale." The tanker was carrying more than one million barrels of condensate, an extremely light crude oil, to South Korea when it collided with the freighter.<br />And experts are further concerned that the even dirtier bunker fuel powering the tanker will<br />be released into the sea, exposing delicate marine life to the extremely toxic substance.<br />The tanker, the Sanchi, was carrying 136,000 tons of highly flammable fuel oil when it crashed into a freighter on Jan. 6.
