A ship carrying diesel sank off the coast of one of Ecuador’s Galapagos Islands on Saturday, with the extent of the ecological damage as yet unknown.
The ship, called Albatroz, went down near the island of Santa Cruz, according to the state-run oil company Petroecuador.
The company said a contingency plan had been activated, with containment booms set up around the site of the sinking, although they did not say how much diesel was on board the ship or how much may have spilled.
All four of the crew members escaped the wreckage safely, Petroecuador added.
On Twitter, the Galapagos National Park’s official account said a dispersing agent had been used to ‘limit possible negative impacts on the environment’.
The UNESCO Natural World Heritage Site is renowned for its giant tortoises is remarkable for being the only place on Earth that thousands of species call home.
An estimated 97 percent of Galapagos reptiles and 80 percent of the archipelago’s land birds cannot be found anywhere else.
The islands – located in the Pacific around 600 miles from Ecuador – inspired the British naturalist Charles Darwin, who visited aboard HMS Beagle aged 22, to pen the The Origin of Species, considered the foundation of evolutionary biology.
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