cial fishing and boating activities, as well as marine and bird life. La Riviere says that:
"Although petroleum is almost entirely biodegradable, it takes the microbes that break it down a long time to accomplish the task . . . in the meantime, an oil spill's effects are lethal for a variety of plankton, fish larvae and shellfish, as well as for such large animals as birds and marine mammals."
Stein says that a 1990 report by the Group of Experts on the Scientific Aspects of Marine Pollution concluded that "although the open ocean is still fairly healthy, many coastal areas are severely polluted."
As proven world petroleum reserves have increased, the industrialized world came to depend more and more on petroleum as a source of energy. The Economist reported in 1993 that since 1985 "the value of oil shipped has almost doubled to 1.5 billion tonnes a year."
The potential for very large oil spills is directly related to the tremendous expansion in the use of "supertankers" to transport crude oil from the principal producing countries, primarily in the Middle East, to refineries and ultimately consumers in the industrialized world. Oil tankers carry more cargo than all other ships. Their capacity increased by more than seven times between the 1950s and 1969. Today, they carry most of the world's trans-oceanic oil.
From the late 1960s onwards, the world has experienced a number of very large oil spills. The largest spills include the six million barrels spilled into the Persian gulf as a result of the 1991 war and a 1994 spill of a reported two million barrels from a Russian pipeline in the Komi Republic Arctic area. Others have included the spills from the 1979 Ixtoc blowout in Mexico (400,000 metric tons), the 1967 tanker T
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