January 27th 2025: This report indicates small tar balls near Odesa; Black Sea surface currents can be complex but there is a general anticlockwise gyre that could move oil from Russia towards Ukraine.
January 17th 2025: The generation of oily waste from the recent incident in the Kerch Strait could approach or exceed historical worst-case volumes as a result of the storm damage to two tankers, Volgoneft-212 and Volgoneft-239 on 15th December 2024, according to recent reports.
Viktor Danilov-Danilyan – the head of science at the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS) – said in a 17 January interview with a Russian newspaper and quoted by the BBC, as estimating the quantity of contaminated soil to be between 200,000–500,000 tonnes https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c23ngk5vgmpo.
If this estimate is correct, it would exceed some of the largest contaminated waste volumes from historical oil spills (see graph: credit: Ipieca https://www.ipieca.org/resources/oil-spill-waste
There is an English update dated 17 January on the Kerch spills on the Ministry website: https://en.mchs.gov.ru/for-mass-media/novosti/5442341 and The Maritime Executive also carried a report with what appears to be a drone video of the beached rear section of the Volgoneft 239 which has been bunded to facilitate removal of fuel oil, reported to be Mazut https://www.maritime-executive.com/article/russian-fuel-oil-spill-sickens-150-cleanup-workers
Current Map source:
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/marine-science/articles/10.3389/fmars.2023.1213333/full
