The captain and the navigation officer of a container ship that smashed into a reef off a popular New Zealand holiday resort were jailed on Friday for causing the country's worst environmental disaster in decades.

The two men, captain Mauro Balomaga and navigation officer Leonil Relon, both Filipino nationals, were jailed for seven months. They had faced maximum terms of seven years imprisonment.

The vast swirl of plastic waste floating in the North Pacific has grown 100-fold over the last 40 years, according to a research paper published Wednesday.
And scientists warned the killer soup of microplastic — particles smaller than five millimetres – threatened to alter the open ocean’s natural environment.
In the period 1972 to 1987, no microplastic was found in the majority of samples taken for testing, said the paper in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters.

The estimated multibillion-dollar settlement between BP and lawyers representing individual and business plaintiffs in the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill was fleshed out on Wednesday in hundreds of pages of motions and exhibits.

The broad outlines of the agreement in principle reached last month, including an estimated $7.8 billion in payments for economic loss and medical claims, are unchanged in the papers filed in Federal District Court in New Orleans on Wednesday.

The ongoing North Sea gas leak at Total's Elgin platform has not directly contaminated the marine environment, the Scottish government said on Wednesday citing the results of tests of water and sediment.

"All data gathered to date continues to demonstrate that the effects on the marine environment of the Elgin gas leak are, so far, minimal," Scottish Environment Secretary Richard Lochhead said in a statement.

Samples collected on the edge of a two-mile exclusion zone around the evacuated platform found no traces of oil and gas pollution, the government said.

BP Plc will gain access to U.S. government documents that may shed light on the size of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, a crucial issue in determining the oil company's liability.

According to a Wednesday court filing, the government agreed to produce the documents after BP had accused it two weeks ago of unfairly withholding them because they were privileged.

BP has said the documents may show that an August 2010 estimate of 4.9 million barrels of oil spilled, of which about 800,000 barrels were cleaned up, is too high.

France's highest court could annul a verdict against national oil giant Total over a devastating 1999 oil spill off the Brittany coast, a legal source told Reuters on Friday.

Total, currently battling to cut off a gas leak at its North Sea Elgin platform off Scotland, was found guilty for damage caused to a vast expanse of coastline and wildlife when the Erika, a 24-year-old tanker it had chartered, broke apart in a 1999 storm, spilling some 20,000 of crude into the Bay of Biscay.

An oil sheen spotted near Royal Dutch Shell platforms in the central Gulf of Mexico has caused the company to send a spill response vessel and seek aircraft over flights, a Shell spokeswoman said on Wednesday.

The source of the one-mile by 10-mile sheen between Shell's Mars and Ursa projects is unknown and not linked to the facilities, but Shell is responding "proactively," a company statement said.

An on-call, after-hours spokesman for the Coast Guard said he had no information about the incident.

The cost of damage to the world's oceans from climate change could reach $2 trillion a year by 2100 if measures to cut greenhouse gas emissions are not stepped up, a study by marine experts said on Wednesday.

The study found that without action to limit rising greenhouse gas emissions, the global average temperature could rise by 4 degrees Celsius by the end of the century causing ocean acidification, sea level rise, marine pollution, species migration and more intense tropical cyclones. It would also threaten coral reefs, disrupt fisheries and deplete fish stocks.

The captain and second officer of a ship that caused New Zealand's biggest sea pollution disaster pleaded guilty to criminal charges yesterday and could face lengthy jail terms, officials said.

The officers were in charge of the Liberian-flagged Rena when it ploughed into a reef last year, releasing an oil slick that killed thousands of sea birds and fouled beaches in the North Island's pristine Bay of Plenty.