Eight months

Royal Decree 96/2025 was signed on 11 November 2025. It created a marine buffer zone reserve around the Hallaniyat Islands, off the Dhofar coast, where the Arabian Sea runs deep and cold and turtles come ashore to nest.

The decree refers to an annex setting out the reserve's boundaries. The annex was not published with it, so the area of the thing is not a number this piece can give you, and a figure has been circulating that nobody here has read on a government page.

On 30 June 2026, seven months and nineteen days later, the Caroline Bezengi ran aground inside it. A sanctioned Suezmax with roughly a million barrels of crude aboard, bound for Asia.

By 10 August Oman's Environment Authority had put a figure on the slick: about 390 square kilometers, extending some 449 kilometers along its trajectory, coming within about 7 kilometers of shore at the nearest point. It stated there were no indications of impact on critical infrastructure, including seawater desalination plants.

Greenpeace, tracking the same water by satellite, had it at 45 square kilometers on 26 July, 150 on 2 August, and 600 on 4 August.

Both figures are here because printing one alone would be choosing a side by omission. They are not the same kind of number: one is a government's assessment of its own waters and one is a campaigning organization's read of a satellite, reported by a newspaper. They disagree by a factor of roughly one and a half, on a question that is in principle answerable from orbit, and nobody has reconciled them.

The khareef is the reason the salvage cannot proceed and it is also the reason Dhofar has a tourist season. For three months every summer the southwest monsoon drags cloud and drizzle over a coast that is otherwise desert, the hills turn green, and Salalah fills with visitors who have come to see rain.

The same weather makes the sea off those islands unworkable. "Adverse climatic conditions of the autumn monsoon season have significantly complicated technical spill response operations," said Mohammed Abdullah Al Rawahi, Oman's Director General of Maritime Affairs, in the flattest available language. Ed Wollaston, who runs global response at the maritime risk firm Ambrey, put it as an extremely challenging situation compounded by the weather.

A salvage team boarded in mid-August, seven weeks after the grounding.

The oil has reached the mainland. Reporting puts it along roughly 40 kilometers of coast near Ras Madrakah, with Masirah Island potentially exposed, though the day it first came ashore is not something anybody has printed clearly enough to repeat.

What has to be decided now is not really about this hull. A reserve was declared in November and a vessel nobody would insure was allowed to sit broken inside it from the end of June, through a monsoon that was always going to arrive on schedule. Whatever is written into the next decree about that water, the interesting question is what it says about vessels rather than about turtles.