Great Barrier Reef Oil Spill: 14 Ships Under Investigation

Earth's biggest coral reef system has been under threat in the last couple of years due to various factors. And now, yet another one appears to plague the unique site - an oil spill 30 kilometers long.

"Fourteen ships have been identified as possible sources of a film of oil stretching, in broken sections, 30 kilometres long and five kilometres wide south of Townsville," Brisbane Times reported recently.

According to Maritime Services Queensland general manager Patrick Quirk, the agency know the ships that passed through the area of concern.

"There are 14 ships that we consider are possible sources of oil and we plan to take oil samples from all of those ships," he told the publication. "We already have samples from five ships in Australian ports and when the others port in Australia or overseas we will get samples."

Quirk also added that the agency is "pulling out all stops to find the culprit" via a "chemical match."

The oil slick was reportedly confirmed Friday night after a fisherman reported the sighting on the morning of the same day.

However, the oil spill could not be found Saturday by planes scouring the area using ultraviolet light sensors. The weather and the changing currents have broken up the oil slick into oily film and patches.

Although the said spill is not the product of a huge tanker spill, "the remnants may still turn up on local beaches and there are fears it could stray into the reef," Mashable said.

"It is quite possible that in a week's time - maybe in three days time - on some of the beaches around Townsville - there will be small globules of a spongy material found on the beach, because it doesn't all deteriorate," Quirk explained.

This is not the first time that the Great Barrier Reef played host to an oil spill. Back in 2010, a Chinese ship called Shen Neng 1 had released a 3 kilometer oil slick from a leaking oil tank and was subsequently fined $1 million by the Queensland Government.

However, the worst spill would be the 2009 incident, "when 60 kilometres of coastline was covered by oil from the the MV Adventurer, which lost 100,000 litres of fuel in an accident," MailOnline recalled. Some parts of the Sunshine Coast were affected by the spill and was declared "disaster zones."

"It took more than 16 months and 1425 people to clean up the spill, and cost more than $4 million," the British publication said.

The reef had been declared under threat from human agents. It was only last year that researchers had spoken about the effect of global warming on marine life in that it would promote more coral bleaching due to rising water temperatures.

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