Potentially Polluting Wrecks in the Blue Pacific

Marine pollution is a global and transboundary issue that negatively affects the environment, people, and coastal economies around the world. It is widely recognised as one of the four major threats to the world’s oceans, along with climate change, habitat destruction and over-exploitation of living marine resources (SPREP, 2020). Since the large-scale introduction of oil-fueled shipping in the 1930s, marine pollution incidents have occurred in practically all coastal waters across the globe. In the Pacific Region the greatest concentration of these incidents stemmed from the loss of over 3800 ships during the World War II (WWII) (SPREP, 2003a, b) (Fig. 8.1). At the time of their loss, these ships contained as many as 1.5 billion gallons of petrochemicals, and hundreds of thousands of tons of explosive ordnance (Michel et al., 2005), an unknown amount of which remains in these wrecks today.