everyone in the world by now must have
heard about the tragic oil spill in the
Gulf of Mexico or leak of oil
continuing and we thought that it would
be interesting to show you what crude
oil is really like after much searching
around the university my colleague Sam
found some samples they're here you can
see some of them are beginning to leak
already and there's a terrible stink of
oil in here so we go in the lab and have
a look at them there so oil is quite
complicated material it's formed under
the ground at Great depth from layers of
plant material and animal material which
is compressed by the rocks and the
weight of the Rocks oil is not the same
from everywhere over the world because
it just depends how the rocks in that
particular place had been treated over
millions of years some crude oil that
comes out of the ground is really runny
like um almost like water and others is
so thick that it's even thicker than
molasses or trial in the Gulf of Mexico
the oil is being released into the sea
so let's see what happens when you mix
oil and
water so here we have some water all
crude oil is less dense than water so it
floats so even if you release it at the
bottom of the sea it's going to float up
to the surface so here again I've got
the North Sea oil the rather runny oil
and if we fill up some oil here put it
to the Bottom of the Sea and now release
it
slowly so you can see straight away that
the oil is floating on the surface in a
very thin layer if you look at it from
the side you can hardly see it at all so
you can immediately see the sort of
cleanup problem that you're going to
have because the oil covers a huge area
but a very thin layer on the surface of
the sea so there's not very much to
scoop up in one any one place and the
other point about oil is that it repels
water there's the famous saying oil and
water don't mix now the big problem
comes with Wildlife particularly
Birds the reason that birds can sit on
the water and don't sink is because they
have oil on their feathers natural oils
that repel the
water when a duckling is first hatched
from the egg if you put it in the water
it sinks it takes several days for the
oil to go on the feathers so they can
swim so therefore when birds feathers
come into contact with crudee oil
there's a problem and I've got some
feathers here these are from a pillow so
don't worry I haven't killed a bird to
get it and here's some feathers and
let's just see what happens if we put
the feathers into the
oil and you can see it's like a
miracle it cleans up all the oil but for
the poor bird
all the water repellent properties of
its feathers are spoiled you've got this
thick oil which make the feathers
clamped together the water gets to the
bird's skin and they get cold eventually
they can dive hypothermia and of course
they can't fly because their feathers
aren't fluffy anymore the way that you
can clean up the birds and remove the
oil is by using so-called surfactant
this is essenti like soap what it does
is to allow the oil to form tiny tiny
droplets which are essentially Do no
harm the difficulty is that the
surfactants that remove the crude oil
also remove the oil from the bird's
feathers people know how to clean up
water but it is the scale of the problem
you're talking about slicks of oil that
are covering hundreds if not thousands
of square miles