Year 3 and 4 received a letter about helping an Oil company research efficient methods of cleaning up oil after an oil spill.
After investigating many ways of clean up, we reached our conclusions to help inform the research.
Booms are temporary floating barriers that are used to help contain oil spills. We used some string to replicate a boom and found that although they are effective in containing the oil, it doesn’t clean it up by itself.
Then, we tried to clean the oil off of the surface of the water using a cotton pad and cotton buds. We found that these weren’t very efficient ways of removing oil from the surface of the water.
We also looked into how effective it would be to scoop the oil off of the water. We found this effective.
Finally, we used washing up liquid to replicate chemicals that would be used during an oil spill. We found this to be an effective method at dispersing the oil away from a certain area.
