Nine weeks after a ruptured oil rig sprang a leak, the catastrophic consequences are becoming apparent. 'If the oil were washing up on beaches, there'd be national outrage', Dr Gilly Llewellyn, Conservation Director, WWF. Photo: KARA BURNS / WWF

By Kathy Marks Sea birds are dying and thousands of marine creatures are at risk from a massive oil spill in the Timor Sea, off north-west Australia, warn the first scientists to survey the isolated site. A ruptured drilling rig has been spewing oil, gas and concentrate into the ocean for the past nine weeks, but until yesterday the environmental impact was unclear because of the remoteness of the spot, 155 miles offshore. Now a World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) team has travelled there and returned with a report detailing an ecological disaster unfolding far from the eyes of the public. Gilly Llewellyn, a WWF biologist who led the survey team, said the leak – the equivalent of 2,000 barrels of oil a day, according to an Australian government estimate – was taking place in an area “teeming with marine life”, including dolphins, turtles, sea snakes and migratory seabirds. The spill, reportedly the worst in Australian waters for 40 years, was “a massive contamination event, spread over thousands of square kilometres”, Dr Llewellyn told The Independent. She said: “At one point the sun was setting and we were sailing through this slick that we couldn’t see the end of. Then we saw a pod of dolphins surface literally in a sea of oil. It just made me feel sick.” … The remoteness of the area, a tropical environment of coral and pinnacle reefs, has kept the scandal “out of sight, out of mind”, Dr Llewellyn believes. “If the oil were washing up on beaches, there would be national and global outrage,” she said. “But there’s only a trickle of information coming out, so it’s not getting the attention it deserves.” …

Oil spill off Australian coast poses major threat to marine life