Sediment Penetration Exercise
Fig. 2. BP oil spill cleanup efforts.
Beaches are made up of sediments, which were deposited by the
ocean. Sediments range from clay and mud, which are very fine-
grained, to coarse-grained sand or gravel. This exercise
demonstrates how lighter and heavier oils behave differently when
spilled onto fine-grained, medium-grained, and coarse-grained
sediment.
Fig. 2. Hawaii Beach sand representing different grain size.
In oil spill response, differences among oils in whether and how they
penetrate into different sediments is important. These differences
affect our predictions of whether the oil is likely to remain on the
surface if it hits the beach, or to penetrate to some degree into the
beach sediment. As you can imagine, it's much harder to clean up
subsurface oil than oil that stays on the beach surface. When we
expect spilled oil to penetrate into beach sediment, we know that it
must be cleaned up as quickly as possible.
In this experiment, we use molasses to simulate a heavy oil, such as
a fuel oil for ships, and mineral oil to simulate a lighter oil, such as a
light crude or diesel oil.
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