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An oil spill is something that nobody wants, but the fact is that they happen and mostly likely down the road there will be another. In an article written by Dawn Errede and David Crisman they stated that “Fuel oil spills typically occur in the fall at the start of heating seasons, when oil deliverers are likely to be new and unfamiliar with the homes they are serving.” Whoever is responsible for the spill is the one who will have to pay for the cleanup. To this day people are trying to find new ways to clean up oil spills. The Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska they used “brooms and skimmers to contain and remove oil pollution”(www.oceansatlas.org). Even with all the advancement and technology in society, there is still room for improvement so we can make our environment safer.
Oil is a very important natural resource that is used in many ways of life. Oil is transported all over the world and it would be great if we could prevent spills altogether but we need to prepare ourselves on how to treat spills if they are to happen. During this lab our group wanted to test how dawn dish detergent would treat an oil spill and both open water and then again on a sandy beach. The objective of the lab was for our group to test, observe and determine how well dawn dish detergent would treat the oil spills in both environments. Our hypothesis was that the dawn dish detergent would break down the oil and make it easier to clean in both our open/sandy beach experiments
Materials and Methods
We were told our two environments would be an open water and a sandy beach. Therefore we had to create the environment within a plastic tub. The open water environment was simple to make because alls we needed was a plastic bucket filled about halfway with water and 50mL’s of oil. Then we slowly poured the 50 mL’s of vegetable oil about 1 cm over the water. After pouring the oil we observed and made notes of what the oil initially did, we then waited 3...