Ship with 20,000 litres of diesel fuel sinks off Greenland

A ship carrying 20,000 litres of diesel fuel ran aground and sank off Greenland's coast on Thursday, said authorities who were working to contain a potential spill in the fragile Arctic ecosystem.

Published: 20 September 2024 09:32 CEST

Ship with 20,000 litres of diesel fuel sinks off Greenland

File photo. A ship carrying thousands of litres of diesel has reportedly sunk off Greenland. Photo: Mads Claus Rasmussen/Ritzau Scanpix

“Last night, around 1:45am, a ship hit a reef near Nanortalik and started taking on water,” Greenlandic police said in a statement.

The vessel sank around 7am.

Authorities believe the 30-metre ship contained some 15,000 to 20,000 litres of diesel fuel in its tanks, in addition to 1,000 litres of engine oil.

The name of the vessel has not been disclosed, nor the type of ship.

Authorities said it was impossible at this stage to determine the extent of any pollution, but said they were using a pump and had placed floating booms in a 50-metre perimeter around the site to contain any spill.

All of the people on board were evacuated, but no details were provided about their numbers or nationalities.

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According to a report recently published in the scientific journal Science, tremors that were registered in September 2023 originated from the massive wave rocking back and forth in the Dickson fjord in Greenland’s remote east.

“The completely unique thing about this event is how long the seismic signal lasted and how constant the frequency was,” one of the authors of the report, Kristian Svennevig, from the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS), told news agency AFP.

“Other landslides and tsunamis have produced seismic signals but only for a couple of hours and very locally. This one was observed globally all the way to the Antarctic,” he said.

The phenomenon initially surprised the scientific community, which began by defining it as an “unidentified seismic object” before determining that the source was the landslide.

In September 2023, 25 million cubic metres of rock and ice fell into the fjord in the remote and uninhabited area, almost 200 kilometres (124 miles) from the ocean.

The landslide triggered a 200-metre-high mega-tsunami at its epicentre.

Seventy kilometres away, four-metre-high tsunami waves damaged a research base on the island of Ella.

The collapse was caused by the thinning of the glacier at the base of the mountain, a process accelerated by climate change, according to the report.

“With the Arctic continuing to warm we may expect the frequency and magnitude of such events to increase in the future,” Svennevig said.

“We have no experience with dealing with an Arctic as warm as we observe now,” he added.

He stressed the need for early warning systems to be put in place, but noted that it was a challenge in such extreme environments.