NARRATOR: They're watching you.
More than 6,000 satellites circle the Earth.
Every day, they uncover new, mysterious phenomena
that defy explanation.
Revealed from the skies,
the ghosts of war.
What an amazing structure to find in the middle of nowhere.
NARRATOR: Attack of the million-ton goop monster.
It almost physically shouldn't be possible.
NARRATOR: And the weirdest war in history.
There were stabbings and shootings
between rival gangs of egg collectors.
NARRATOR: Baffling phenomena, mysteries from space.
What on Earth are they?
[theme music playing]
December 2021.
Alex Richie is traveling through Poland, drawn
by a mystery hidden from human eyes.
RICHIE: I'm deep in the Polish forest
to try and figure out what
on Earth these mysterious things could be.
NARRATOR: A laser scan of a dense patch of woodland
has revealed a series of structures swallowed by time.
The Lidar scan reveals something
absolutely extraordinary.
The forest is hiding dozens of perfectly
straight parallel lines and mounds of earth.
So something quite unusual is going on here.
NARRATOR: Richie's journey takes her deep
into the region of Silesia,
a place with a long, twisting human history
stretching back more than 100,000 years.
What's really strange is the locals
I've spoken to don't seem to know
anything about these structures in the woods.
They've just been forgotten about.
NARRATOR: Richie heads north.
As she approaches the coordinates in the image,
the landscape begins to change.
Now most of this forest is pretty flat.
But this...
is quite astounding,
because there are three huge mounds.
NARRATOR: Richie believes this is one of
the giant lines visible in the image.
Its purpose, however, remains unclear.
Far in the distance, I can see some sort of building.
Oh, my goodness!
What is this?
NARRATOR: An arched edifice rises some 30 feet
from the end of the mounds.
RICHIE: It's huge.
What an amazing structure to find
in the middle of the forest.
In the middle of nowhere.
NARRATOR: One of the structure's walls yields a clue.
Oh, no -- look.
This is amazing.
This says Opitz,
which is a German name, 16-9-1942.
That's incredible.
NARRATOR: Richie has uncovered a Nazi mega structure,
and it was a place of extreme violence.
There's these massive walls riddled with bullet holes,
and you can see the pieces of metal
that are just lying around.
Now it really all makes sense.
This discovery of all of these...
bullets in this huge structure,
faced by these massive trenches.
This was a Nazi firing range.
It's quite an extraordinary place.
NARRATOR: Declassified files reveal that
Hitler takes control of this massive facility
in the early 1930s, when this region of Poland
was German territory.
It will play a key role in his plans to
secretly rearm his country in violation
of international peace treaties.
MORGAN: In the aftermath of World War I,
the Versailles treaty limited what Germany could make for
its military.
It limited combat aircraft, it limited German
naval strength, it limited the rearmament program.
NARRATOR: The treaty restricts the strength of
the German Army to 100,000 troops.
Hitler increases this to four million.
He uses this range to prepare his new troops
and weapons for the fury he will soon unleash on the world.
It's obvious that the Nazis invested a huge amount of money
into this vast facility,
but there was a reason for it, because small arms were
tremendously important in the Second World War.
NARRATOR: When Hitler rises to power,
the Nazis' primary infantry weapon is the 98k rifle,
but it soon becomes clear that it is not
suitable for the demands of World War II battlefields.
The German troops were armed primarily with weapons that had
proven very effective during the First World War,
you know, trench warfare.
MUNOZ: The nature of warfare had changed dramatically.
They did not have the rate of fire required
to conduct modern, urban warfare operations.
NARRATOR: In response, Nazi engineers designed
the first assault rifle in history,
the Sturmgewehr, or MP 44.
The Sturmgewehr, or Storm Gun,
was the name given by Hitler himself to the weapon,
and it was truly a breakthrough in infantry warfare.
It was a revolutionary weapon, because it was the first
small arms weapon
that combined a fully automatic rate of fire with
a detachable magazine.
NARRATOR: The MP 44 provides range and accuracy but also
offers the intense firepower needed for close urban combat.
The MP 44 ended up being sort of the best of both worlds.
CAVELL: It really is a revelation.
It changes all sorts of ideas about how
we're going to equip our soldiers in the field.
NARRATOR: During the war,
the Nazis used the site in the image as
a proving ground for their new weapons of war.
But in the end, victory becomes a numbers game.
While German factories produce around 13 million guns,
the U.S. and Britain churn out almost two times that number.
It's not really armies that win wars,
it's the ability of the nation behind that army to produce
the tools to keep it in the fight.
NARRATOR: Yet, as Richie explores a local archive
to learn more,
she discovers the story of
the giant Nazi range doesn't end there.
This is really like
an Aladdin's cave of old maps and documents.
NARRATOR: Wartime maps show that the range once
formed part of a much larger Nazi facility,
one that played a role in some of the vilest events
of the war.
RICHIE: This was an installation of
enormous importance to the Third Reich.
If these walls could talk,
they would tell a truly sinister history.
NARRATOR: Coming up, death stalks the Polish forests.
These were highly trained, highly murderous,
highly fearsome individuals.
NARRATOR: And the mystery mucus invasion.
This grayish, greenish slime, it's sticking to everything.
NARRATOR: A strange pattern in a Lidar image has led
historian Alex Richie to discover a Nazi shooting range.
Wartime documents reveal its connection to some of
the most controversial chapters of World War II.
The shooting range was part of a huge military complex,
and this complex was used by the SS.
NARRATOR: The SS, or Schutzstaffel, begins life in
1925 as a small personal bodyguard to Hitler.
In the run-up to war, under the command of Heinrich Himmler,
their number grows to 50,000.
The SS were the most ideologically
fanatical of all the German forces.
They literally took a personal oath to Adolf Hitler
and they would fight more fiercely
and with more conviction than any other unit.
NARRATOR: Himmler installs thousands of SS recruits
in Polish forests, like the site in the image.
Those who display the greatest lust for violence are later
involved in some of the most despicable acts of the war.
Locals have talked about Nazi death squads
that stalked these forests during the war.
WALTERS: These Nazi death squads were known as
the Einsatzgruppen, special groups,
and these were highly trained,
highly murderous, highly fearsome individuals.
NARRATOR: During the first three months of World War II,
the Einsatzgruppen murders some 50,000 Poles.
They will go on to commit many more heinous war crimes,
killing around 1.5 million people on
the eastern front and during the Holocaust.
As the conflict unfolds, the story of
the site in the image takes another disturbing turn.
Sadly for the people of Poland,
the 13th Waffen-SS Mountain Division
also visited and trained here.
We tend to think of Waffen-SS divisions as being
these six-foot, blue-eyed, blond-haired Aryans,
but the 13th Waffen Mountain Division
was not Germanic at all.
They are actually made up mostly of Muslims.
NARRATOR: The 13th Division has its origins
in the Balkans campaign of World War II,
which sees Albania, Greece, and Yugoslavia
fall under German control.
When partisan rebellions threaten stability in
the region, Himmler decides to use
local ethnic divisions to his advantage.
Germany had to do something about partisans in Yugoslavia.
They just couldn't bring the uprising under control,
and that then opened the door for them going,
who can we get to help us?
NARRATOR: At the time,
30 percent of Yugoslavians are Muslim.
Himmler, who has long been fascinated by Islam,
devises a plan to mobilize them against
their fellow countrymen.
For him, Islamic fighters, historically, were some of
the greatest fighters in history,
and he wanted to be able to tap into that source of power
if at all possible.
And that is such a rich irony when you consider that,
central to, at the core of German ideology,
was this idea of not just white supremacy,
but the supremacy also of what
white people believe spiritually.
NARRATOR: Himmler tries to navigate this hypocrisy
by claiming that Balkan Muslims
are descended from an ancient Aryan race.
But when enlistment begins in 1943,
few buy into his propaganda.
There were problems with recruitment.
There weren't too many from the Muslim population who were
ready to take up arms and fight for Germany.
NARRATOR: The Nazis turned to the controversial
Muslim leader Amin al-Husseini for help.
By playing on the clerics' hatred of the Allied nations
and anti-Semitic views,
Hitler persuades him to rally more recruits.
Al-Husseini declared that Arabs and Germany were
natural friends, because they shared the same enemies.
WALTERS: Al-Husseini put out an appeal for volunteers to fight,
and the end result was the formation of
the 13th Waffen-SS Division.
NARRATOR: Following Al-Husseini's call to arms,
some 20,000 Balkan Muslims
join the 13th Waffen-SS Division.
The 13th SS had a fez, and right at
the center of the fez was the totenkopf,
the death's head, the skull with the crossbones.
NARRATOR: In September 1943,
the 13th Division begins training in France,
but a group of them soon stages a mutiny,
killing several of their commanding officers.
It's a pretty catastrophic mutiny.
Many of them actually escaped into the French countryside
and Himmler's like, "Oh, God, did we make a mistake here?"
NARRATOR: In the fall of 1943, Himmler moves
thousands of the 13th Division to the site in the image.
After five months in the Polish woods,
they embark on a series of brutal campaigns
in the Balkan states.
Unfortunately, their aggressions are directed
against ethnic cleansing in the region,
which is exactly what the Nazis had hoped for.
NARRATOR: When the war draws to a close,
the division surrenders to advancing Allied forces,
who executes several officers for war crimes.
Over the following decades,
the site that helped give rise to their atrocities is
abandoned and slowly reclaimed by the forest.
The division was notorious in its cruelty and its brutality,
which taints it with some
of the worst crimes that were committed by the Germans in
the Second World War.
Today, the story of the 13th Waffen Mountain Division
is mired in controversy,
for while their atrocities cannot be denied,
for some, they, too, were victims of Hitler's
exploitation of anyone who stood in his way.
It was a direct manipulation of
the religious diversity of the Balkans.
It was Germany going, we know just
how to turn these people against each other.
RICHIE: This shooting range is part of a vast system
of terror that was unleashed on the 1st September 1939.
NARRATOR: Coming up, swamp things.
It's completely brutal, and only the very toughest
get through.
NARRATOR: And 400,000 tons of terror.
It could pose a threat to the entire region.
NARRATOR: July 2020.
Flying over the wild expanse of northern California,
an aerial survey captures something
in the landscape below.
KOUROUNIS: I'm seeing a strange pattern
of geometric shapes here.
It looks like lines of circles or spheres.
These circles are regularly occurring in a pattern,
but some of them look more like rings.
Some of them have, like, a solid core.
I honestly cannot imagine what this could be.
NARRATOR: Over 150 of the bizarre structures
stretch across a swampy body of water.
KOUROUNIS: It seems very much to be out in the wilderness.
Who would build something so geometrically perfect
out in the middle of nowhere?
NARRATOR: Guy Walters thinks the structure's location
and its precise layout
could mean it serves a military purpose.
There's this particular section of the American army
that has this really long and secretive
history of using swamps for its really
grueling training regime.
They're known as the Rangers.
The Rangers are the U.S. Army's
premier light infantry unit and trace
their roots back to before the Revolutionary War.
Today, they play a clandestine role
in conflicts around the world.
What the Rangers do is to specialize in going
behind enemy territory to carry out really daring raids.
So these are the most elite soldiers in the world.
NARRATOR: Before being deployed, recruits must complete
Ranger school,
a brutal 61-day training program.
Each phase of that training is designed to
challenge and exhaust candidates in very
specific ways.
So what the first phase does is to
center on kind of military skills and endurance.
And then the second phase examines survival techniques.
NARRATOR: Up to half of all recruits drop out
of ranger school, many during the feared swamp phase.
The swamp phase is all about waterborne operations,
simulating intense battle environments.
WALTERS: It's completely brutal.
It's completely relentless, and only
the very toughest get through.
You have to know how to push through
even when every fiber of you is screaming stop.
NARRATOR: The structures in this Californian swamp would
be the perfect training ground for Rangers,
but biologists believe this site
serves a more peaceful purpose.
KAYS: What we're looking at in this image is artificial
nest islands set up to provide sanctuary for migratory birds.
These are part of a statewide effort
to address the problems caused
by a series of catastrophic events
that stretch back over a century.
NARRATOR: Those events begin in 1848,
at the dawn of the Gold Rush.
The Gold Rush brought an endless surge of
ambitious gold seekers to San Francisco, in particular.
And at one point, it was the fastest growing city
in the world.
NARRATOR: 300,000 people travel to California
during the Gold Rush,
the largest mass migration in U.S. history.
The city was utterly flooded with workers, who were
spending their days doing backbreaking labor,
hunting for gold.
In the evenings, these guys were ravenously hungry.
At the time, this area had fairly limited agriculture.
So when all these gold prospectors arrived,
the area had a hard time providing enough food
for all the people.
NARRATOR: The lack of available food
causes prices to soar.
Stores charge the equivalent of $56 for a slice
of buttered bread and $30 for a single egg.
Looking to cash in on the protein shortage,
entrepreneurs turn their attention
to the Farallon Islands,
A desolate set of rocks some 30 miles off the coast.
Every spring, a colossal number of sea birds would
arrive and basically cover the island with their nests.
KOUROUNIS: If what you wanted was eggs,
this place was an open treasure chest filled with them.
NARRATOR: Migratory birds, similar to those now found
at the nesting grounds seen from space
blanket the Farallon Islands in eggs.
This means there are riches to be made
for anyone who dares venture there.
Every trip out to the islands was a dangerous journey.
There was the rough crossing through treacherous waters,
slippery rocks where many men fell to their deaths.
And, of course, there was the competition.
KAYS: Each year, more and more people would arrive at
the Farallons to try to harvest the eggs in the spring,
which led to more and more competition.
Eventually, tensions even escalated to the point
where there were stabbings
and shootings between rival gangs of egg collectors.
NARRATOR: Between 1849 and 1896, gangs steal
millions of eggs from the islands.
The bird population plummets by 85 percent.
The speed at which we managed to kill these birds
off that were once so plentiful is astonishing.
But the birds in the Farallons weren't the only ones
to face this kind of devastation
in the 19th century.
NARRATOR: One such bird is the passenger pigeon.
A. MORGAN: The passenger pigeon used to be
the most common bird in North America.
You would regularly see billions flying overhead.
WALTERS: There were so many of them,
they would literally kind of blacken the skies
for hours at a time.
The problem was, these gigantic congregations, if you like,
also made them very, very easy to hunt.
NARRATOR: Over a period of just 50 years,
hunters erased the passenger pigeon from existence.
During the 20th century,
the slaughter of other species continues, with
three billion birds lost since 1970 alone.
But thanks to artificial nesting sites,
like those captured from the sky,
the decimation may finally be coming to an end.
These artificial islands in this image
are one small example of
our attempt to right our wrongs
against wildlife in the past.
NARRATOR: Coming up, 100 square miles of nasty.
What we're looking at here is one
of the most disgusting things on Earth.
NARRATOR: And the wrath of the Golden Horde.
Take no prisoner was their rule.
April 30th, 2021.
Satellites scan the coast of Northwest Turkey,
along the Sea of Marmara.
KOUROUNIS: There are boats along the coast,
but all the water around them is just a smear of goo.
It looks disgusting.
It's like someone emptied a load of cream or paint
into the water and started mixing it all around.
Whatever this white stuff is, it's definitely not something
that's supposed to be in the water.
NARRATOR: Analysts examine the creamy concoction for clues.
It's this grayish-greenish slime or sludge
that looks like it's sticking to everything.
One possible explanation is a fish called the hagfish
that exudes a enormous
amount of slime that looks very similar to what we're
seeing in this image.
NARRATOR: Hagfish are primitive creatures,
which, when threatened, release
vast amounts of slime that clogs predators' gills.
Up to 400 times the volume of
a hagfish's body can be converted into slime.
It almost physically shouldn't be possible.
NARRATOR: But when scientists sample the waters in the image,
they discover that it contains something
even more nauseating than hagfish slime.
In fact, what we're looking at here is a substance called
sea snot, which must be
one of the most disgusting things on Earth.
NARRATOR: See snot is a foul-smelling,
thick, mucus-like substance.
It's a weird byproduct of several microorganisms,
including phytoplankton.
Phytoplankton actually create tiny little drops of
mucus naturally that float down into the ocean.
But for it to accumulate at
this level, something must be wrong.
NARRATOR: Phytoplankton are crucial to life on Earth,
generating half our planet's oxygen
as a byproduct of their growth.
But human interference has triggered a catastrophic
sequence of events in the Sea of Marmara.
KAYS: The problem occurs when pollution,
in the form of runoff fertilizers from agriculture
or from a sewage that runs into the ocean basically fertilizes
the ocean, and the phytoplankton populations go nuts.
NARRATOR: When the microorganisms multiply,
so does the amount of mucus they produce.
Stagnant water turbocharges the process,
creating vast mats of sea snot that cover 100 square miles.
As it starts to accumulate, it traps all sorts of other
things in there, some debris,
and other rotting material, which produces a really good
environment for other types of bacteria to grow.
The problem isn't limited to one harbor or one cove.
This stuff is everywhere, all throughout the Sea
of Marmara and other coastal areas as well.
The situation is completely out of control.
NARRATOR: As the sea snot overwhelms the coast,
it cripples Turkey's multibillion-dollar
tourism and fishing industries.
This amount of sea snot can really
cause all kinds of problems for local communities.
No one wants to go sit next to a stinky, slimy beach,
not to mention the damage that this is causing for the natural
marine life that lives there
and now finds themselves covered in sea snot.
NARRATOR: The gruesome mats of slime don't
just affect the surface of the sea.
As they grow,
they can become 100 feet thick,
sucking oxygen out of the water column and choking sea life.
Organisms like corals, sponges, mollusks,
they're all being smothered to death in enormous numbers.
It's terrifying to think of the mass
die off that's happening beneath the waves.
The situation has gotten so bad that workers are being sent
to literally vacuum up
the sea snot, load it into trucks,
and truck it away to a landfill.
NARRATOR: As the problem intensifies, 40 ships
and 1,000 workers join the cleanup,
collecting 100,000 cubic feet of sea snot in just one week.
It's a tremendous effort, but it might prove futile.
I mean, what is the point of vacuuming up
just the snot at the surface
when the conditions are still right for
the phytoplankton to keep making more and more of it?
NARRATOR: Scientists fear that this is just
the first stage of a global sea snot invasion.
Increases in global water temperatures and pollutants
mean we're likely to see
many more attacks from this aquatic booger monster.
If we don't find a way to limit the amount of pollution
that runs into the oceans,
we're gonna see this kind of sea snot show up
more and more frequently and in more and more places.
NARRATOR: Coming up, the desert time capsules.
Some claim that these balls
are created by underground lightning.
NARRATOR: And... red death.
The disaster could have global consequences.
NARRATOR: March 2022 -- in Western Kazakhstan,
a drone scans the barren 80,000-square-mile
Ustyurt Plateau
and captures an unexpected sight.
All around, there's this kind of featureless landscape,
and then you've got this big,
big cluster of all these kind of giant balls.
It's completely bewildering.
NARRATOR: Thousands of the rocky orbs
litter the rugged landscape.
Looking closer at some of these balls,
they are amazingly round.
It's fairly common to see rocks worn smooth
by rivers or the sea,
but we almost never see them like this.
It seems unnatural.
NARRATOR: The Ustyurt Plateau has a long and bloody history,
one which could offer a clue to
the strange spherical boulders revealed from the skies.
It's not entirely far-fetched to imagine that these boulders
polka-dotting the landscape were the result
of a military assault.
HORTON: One possibility is that these could have been flung
from catapults, from trebuchets,
which was a very favored method in medieval warfare for
besieging cities and attacking armies.
NARRATOR: One army known to have used trebuchets
in Kazakhstan are the Mongol Hordes of Genghis Khan.
In 1219 CE, his army of 200,000 horsemen
sweeps through the region
on its way to creating the largest unified land empire
in history.
The way the Mongols, on the move, completely
devastated cultures,
the speed and murderous rate at which they expanded,
struck terror into the hearts of everyone in the way.
NARRATOR: At the time, much of Central Asia is
ruled by the wealthy Khwarazmian Empire.
The ferocity of the Mongol assault is unlike
anything they have experienced in their long history.
[shouting]
The Mongols besieged the richest cities in
the empire, and they murdered their citizens.
HUNT: The brutality of the Mongols is
well attested -- when they took a territory,
that literal phrase, "Take no prisoner," was their rule.
NARRATOR: Perhaps the most fearsome Mongol siege
weapon is the boulder-launching trebuchet.
The principle behind a trebuchet
is actually deceptively simple.
It's just really basic physics around torque,
but scaled up, it can become devastating.
The great thing about a trebuchet
is their long distance.
You can shoot a boulder with a trebuchet hundreds of feet,
so long before your army
has to break through a defensive wall, the trebuchet
can do the most effective damage.
NARRATOR: Yet while Mongols are known to have
waged war in the region,
some analysts doubt the giant balls
are relics of their conquests.
It's tempting to look at this image and think, oh well,
maybe these could be abandoned projectiles left by the Mongols
in pursuit of some citadel.
But, you know, even the Mongols wouldn't have hurled
quite so many.
Geologists believe the spheres are bizarre
natural formations,
but their origin divides opinion.
Some in Kazakhstan have claimed that these balls are created by
a kind of form of underground lightning
linked to volcanic activity
that fuses this material together.
Some of the locals even believe
that these spheres are fossilized dinosaur eggs.
NARRATOR: Analysis confirms the mystery spheres do date
from a time when dinosaurs walked these lands.
They're called concretions, and they're time capsules
from the Earth's distant past.
So even though they're not giant dinosaur eggs,
there's actually a grain of truth to the fact that there
are evidence of ancient life captured within the rock.
NARRATOR: 150 million years ago,
Western Kazakhstan is covered in ocean,
a primeval abyss filled with hunters and the hunted.
And beneath the seabed, A process is beginning
that will eventually create the strange spheres
in the image.
A. MORGAN: Although it's not entirely clear
how these things form, our best guesses at the moment
suggest that it's layers and layers of mineral deposited on
a solid core, like a fossil, over time.
NARRATOR: Most geologists believe the process begins
when minerals dissolved in water percolate through
the seabed.
The solution slowly cements around objects such as teeth
or fossils, and over millennia, forms into giant spheres.
This process is very similar to how an oyster
creates a pearl.
It would be absolutely fascinating to actually
crack them open
and find out what might be in the middle
of these stone balls.
NARRATOR: Today, the ocean is long gone.
And as the soft sedimentary rock from its seabed
wears away, the long-buried spheres emerge.
That's why we see them laying out on the surface, half buried
or completely exposed, because over millions of years,
erosion has removed the softer rock
away from these hard concretions.
The landscape is just littered with them,
hundreds upon hundreds of them, strewn across the landscape,
like some giant marble game.
NARRATOR: Coming up, the multimillion-dollar hijack.
Maybe this is a ghost ship
that's been plundered and left for dead.
NARRATOR: June 17th, 2020.
A satellite flying over the Red Sea
captures an image of a suspicious craft
in the water below.
This vessel is huge, and it looks like an oil tanker,
but it also looks abandoned.
NARRATOR: The 1,100-foot-long vessel
languishes away from established shipping lanes.
The paint is deteriorating, seems to be falling apart,
so there's probably not been any activity
on this ship for quite some time.
AUERBACH: Why would you leave this multimillion-dollar vessel
just floating derelict in the middle of nowhere?
It makes no sense.
NARRATOR: The tanker's location off the coast of Yemen
could offer a clue.
NARRATOR: This tanker is floating in a part
of the world that has a fearsome reputation,
pretty ruthless pirates swarming
onto commercial vessels.
So maybe this is a ghost ship,
a ship that's been plundered and left for dead.
NARRATOR: Over the past two decades,
pirates here have attacked vast numbers of ships heading
to the Suez Canal and the Saudi oil fields.
Somali piracy has posed the biggest threat
to commercial shipping in recent history.
[shots firing]
Between 2010 and 2014, there were more than
350 successful or attempted attacks on commercial
shipping vessels.
NARRATOR: Local reports offer a surprising clue
to the origin of these hijackings.
Part of what may be driving the rise in piracy is
the arrival of international fishing vessels
in these local waters.
And that, of course, depletes the stocks
are available to the local fishermen.
NARRATOR: As a result, many Somali fishermen
turn to hijacking ships.
Today, oil tankers are the pirates' main target,
helping net them $120 million a year in ransom.
Pirates hijacked a vessel very similar to this one in 2008,
one called the Sirius Star,
which had around two million barrels of oil on board,
worth about $100 million.
NARRATOR: Maritime records reveal the ship
in the image is called the FSO Safer,
and she's at risk of something
much more dangerous than a pirate attack.
It turns out that this tanker is at the center of
a massive international crisis,
and it could even pose a threat to the safety
of the entire region.
NARRATOR: Documents show that, since 1986,
the giant tanker has been used as a storage facility for
Yemen's oil fields.
But in 2014, a brutal civil war breaks out in the country.
Since then, engineers have been unable to
conduct vital safety checks on the vessel.
It has the capacity to store three million barrels of oil,
and it's reported that there's
just over a million barrels of crude oil on board right now.
That's an awful lot of oil to be just sitting there in
a rusting, dead tanker.
Reportedly, the vessel is an absolute mess, with cracked
pipes that are leaking seawater into the main engine room.
NARRATOR: The problem with the ship's engine room
threatens to trigger a catastrophic chain reaction.
To keep crucial systems running, steam boilers need to
run around the clock,
but those steam boilers have run out of fuel back in 2017.
NARRATOR: Crews on ships like this need to pump inert gas
into their oil tanks to prevent vapor from
spontaneously igniting.
No engine fuel means no pumps,
making the FSO Safer a 400,000-ton time bomb.
This thing is like a tinderbox.
Even the smallest spark
could lead to an absolute catastrophe.
NARRATOR: An explosion could kill the crew
and breach the hull.
And the FSO Safer contains four times more oil
than the Exxon Valdez tanker,
which in 1989 decimated 1,300 miles of Alaskan coastline.
The Exxon Valdez disaster killed hundreds of thousands of
marine animals and cost billions of dollars in
economic loss.
This possible disaster in the Red Sea
threatens to be many orders of magnitudes worse.
NARRATOR: The ship in the image could soon devastate
untold amounts of wildlife and local fish stocks,
creating a humanitarian disaster.
The aftereffects could rumble around the world.
Ten percent of global shipping trade
passes through the Red Sea,
so any cleanup operation is going to severely disrupt
the supply chain.
AUERBACH: A disaster involving the Safer
could have global economic consequences.
Let's just hope that there's
the political will to avert this crisis.