Last week 4th graders in STREAM learned about oil spill remediation. Oil spills into bodies of water are a modern environmental disaster that can have negative economic and environmental impacts, the largest of which in the US was the Deepwater Horizon spill which dumped around 200 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. In this lab, students learned about different methods for attempting to remove oil from water, namely skimming, absorbing or dispersing. They created a hypothesis about the each of the methods, and tested them to see which method was most effective based on their experiments. One main takeaway from this lab is that it is not easy to remove oil from water, and that a large scale cleanup would be very costly and difficult to contain. Perhaps scientists of the future can develop new ways to remove oil from water, such as utilizing fungi or new polymers such as shown in this video here.
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