Oil Spill Lesson

Today, Alex and I are learning about the oil spill in the Gulf Coast. I have found a "new" blog that I follow,  Free Technology for Teachers. I have already used resources from this site several times since I found it about a week ago. Anyway, from this site I found a link to CNN Student News with a report about the oil spill. (By the way, I think we'll start watching the new report each morning. They have about a 10 minute news report and I think it'll be a great way to keep up with current events.)

 Next, we did an experiment I found at How Stuff Works.  Alex helped me write up the rest of this post:

Procedure: We took two ice cubes and put one in each ziplock bag. Then, we took two cottonballs and soaked them in oil. We put 1 oil soaked cottonball on a plate and another oil soaked cottonball on the ice cube (in the baggie).  We took 2 dry cottonballs and did the same thing.

Results: Twenty minutes later, the results were that the oil soaked cottonball on the ice cube was much colder than the cottonball that wasn't in oil.

What we learned: We learned that animals with oil on them get colder than animals without oil on them.

Some of the reasons animals die from an oil spill include:

• 
  
  poisoned by the oil
• 
  
  birds can starve to death because they can't fly to catch their food
• 
  
  their food dies
• 
  
  some freeze to death

Some ways to clean up an oil spill include:

• use special machines to vacuum up the oil
• use rubber barriers around the spill which isolates the oil
• absorb the oil using sponge-like pads which act somewhat like a cottonball