Question: How do you clean up oil spills?
Answer : We have a category devoted to an infamous environmental accident, the
Exxon Valdez Oil Spill, which details several methods of fighting major oil spills at sea. On March 24, 1989, a large oil tanker called the Exxon Valdez ran into a reef off the coast of Alaska and spilled about 10.8 million gallons of oil into the sea. The clean-up took almost four years, and the environment is still recovering. On
this page you can see lots of ways to clean up an oil spill. In water, you can contain the oil with booms and floats, burn it up, use chemicals to disperse it, or skim it mechanically off the surface of the water. An oiled beach is much more difficult to clean: you can blast it with hot pressurized water, douse it with "oil-eating" microbes, or clean rocks and animals with absorbent cloths by hand. Cleaning up an oil spill is hard work, and not especially effective -- only about 14 percent of the Exxon Valdez oil was cleaned up artificially. The rest either evaporated, drifted off to sea, or sank to the bottom of the ocean.
