Environment
Decaying tanker threatens disaster
If an oil tanker in the Red Sea spills its oil, it will lead to a humanitarian crisis in Yemen
Graham Lawton
A HUGE abandoned oil tanker
anchored off Yemen could unleash
a catastrophic oil spill in the
Red Sea, bringing starvation
and death to the region.
The tanker, called Safer, is
about 9 kilometres off Yemen.
It is owned by Yemen’s national oil
firm, which once used it to store
crude oil, but abandoned the ship
in March 2015 after it was captured
by Ansar Allah, a rebel group
known as the Houthis who are
combatants in Yemen’s civil war.
Safer hasn’t been inspected or
maintained since 2015. It was built
in 1976 and should have reached
the end of its working life in 2016,
but is still afloat with around
150,000 tonnes of oil in its fragile
single hull. It is visibly dilapidated
and “continues to deteriorate”,
says Benjamin Huynh at Stanford
University in California. A giant oil
spill is increasingly likely, he says.
A team led by Huynh modelled
the public health effects of
such a spill. “We’re looking
at a potential humanitarian
catastrophe: millions without
food or clean water, outbreaks
of waterborne illness and mass
Biology
Circadian clock
made in lab to probe
biological rhythms
FOR the first time, a cellular
pacemaker – or circadian clock – has
been built outside a living organism.
The clock, copied from a
cyanobacteria, was devised by
Carrie Partch at the University
of California, Santa Cruz, and
her colleagues. It is made from
six proteins and can work without
any human intervention for several
days. “I think the record we’ve got
so far is two weeks,” says Partch.
hospital shutdowns due to lack
of fuel,” he says.
Around half of Yemen’s
30 million people depend on food
aid, 68 per cent of which arrives
through two Red Sea ports, Salif
2020 MAXAR TECHNOLOGIES/GETTY IMAGES
and Hudaydah. An uncontained
spill would close both within days
and keep them closed for weeks.
Up to 8.1 million people wouldn’t
receive food aid for the duration.
If the spill spread into the Gulf
of Aden that number could rise
to 11.9 million, according to the
modelling (Nature Sustainability,
doi.org/gz9s).
A spill would also shut down
the Red Sea fishing industry, which
provides subsistence for a further
1.7 million people. Yemen is already
on the brink of famine, says Huynh.
Desalination plants that supply
more than a million people with
drinking water would be disrupted
too. Many other Yemenis rely on
groundwater pumps and water
trucks, which require fuel. Yemen
imports more than 90 per cent of
its fuel, and previous port closures
have led to severe shortages.
Air pollution from a spill,
especially if it caught fire,
Circadian clocks regulate
the timing of the activity of an
organism’s various cellular systems.
In cyanobacteria, they usually work
on a 24-hour light cycle.
“By forming this clock outside
of a living organism, we can more
closely analyse certain aspects
of the process,” says Partch.
The team was also able to
monitor the rhythms within
cyanobacteria by fluorescently
tagging the proteins to get real-time
data on their timekeeping.
Using this method and by adding
mutations to the test-tube system
that turned off certain parts of the
Safer, an ageing oil tanker
moored off the coast of
Yemen in the Red Sea
would also cause respiratory and
cardiac illness. In the worst-case
scenario in the modelling, this
would increase hospitalisations
by 42 per cent. Port closures
would hamper the supply of
medicines, and fuel shortages
could force hospitals to close.
This would add to existing
stresses on healthcare due to
economic issues, epidemics and
the covid-19 pandemic. In May,
clock, the researchers discovered
that two of the proteins, called SasA
and KaiB, are far more influential
than previously thought.
“We’d previously believed
that SasA was just an amplifier
of the clock – it kept everything
robust,” says Partch. “But we
found that, in fact, its main function
is to recruit one of the clock’s core
proteins, KaiB.”
The team wouldn’t have been
“By forming this clock
outside of a living
organism, we can more
closely analyse it”
the UN said that Yemen’s health
system had collapsed.
“If the Safer breaks up, of course
they cannot cope with that,” says
Jens Laerke at the UN Office for
the Coordination of Humanitarian
Affairs. “The Yemen health
system is already in shambles,
to put it bluntly.”
Previous port closures caused
by blockades led to a breakdown
of the water and sewage systems,
rubbish collection and electricity
supplies, all of which contributed
to a cholera outbreak in Yemen,
which peaked in 2017.
There is a simple solution to the
impending disaster, says Huynh:
get the oil off the ship. But there
is no plan to do so. In 2020, the
Houthis gave the UN permission
to board the tanker for inspections
and repairs. The visit was set for
January, but is delayed indefinitely
after relations broke down.
The UN and its specialist agency,
the International Maritime
Organization, say they are helping
Yemeni authorities to plan an
emergency response, but the
ongoing civil war makes it
extremely difficult. ❚
able to discover this by just looking
at the clock in a living organism,
she says (Science, DOI: 10.1126/
science.abd4453).
The next step is to determine how
the clock trains itself to the 24-hour
cycle in the first place, says Partch.
“They’ve managed to extend
the in-vitro cyanobacteria clock to
include effects on transcriptional
output [which affects gene
expression],” says Amita Sehgal
at the University of Pennsylvania,
noting that the clocks of more
complex organisms like humans
work via this system too. ❚
Jason Arunn Murugesu
16 October 2021 | New Scientist | 15