Today's Class Shall Be About Oil Spills

GREETINGS! 

... caps.


So I totally changed my blog theme! Yay! - I thought it needed a bit of brightening up.
It's just a theme I made on the blogger theme making thingy cause I couldn't find one I actually liked on any website.
Anyway.. Hello!
As anyone who read my previous post will know that I am now studying Sustainability Management at university! Yay!
Well, in my Environmental Management class last week, we learnt about oil spills and why they're bad for the environment.
I know what you're thinking "Duh, of course they're bad for the environment " Oh yeah, smarty pants? Well do you know why? "Because oil is bad" is not an acceptable answer.
Well, I didn't know why either until I did this class so now, I'm going to tell you why! (Also, it helps me study.)

Now, the properties of oil it self are what make it so incredibly horrifyingly bad. Before I did this subject I knew that oil was bad but after learning about it in detail I now know just how bad. 

So, the properties of oil. 

source: eoearth.org

Oil is extremely flammable. Which most people obviously would be aware of. And this should make oil spills easy to clean up right? Let's burn it off, Yay! WRONG, SIR. The problem is, when burned, oil releases toxic chemicals which would be just as detrimental if not more to the environment. So if an oil spill was to catch on fire somehow that would be very bad. 

Oil is hydrophobic. This means that it does not dissolve in water, at all. That's one of the reasons why you can do that cool thing with cooking oil where you poor it into a glass of water and it just sits on top. Plus, I'm sure you've seen an oil spill before the oil is literally spread out on top of the water.
This is advantages in one way, as it makes it pretty easy to just scoop back up... if you can stop it from spreading all over the place. 

Oil spreads very readily. So once it's spilt it can be extremely hard to contain. Which is why people need to act quickly in order to stop it from taking up the whole damn ocean. That's often why even when an oil spill is quite new you'll find that the oil has already spread a considerable distance.

As if oil wasn't already annoying enough it is also both adhesive (meaning, it sticks to other objects) and cohesive (it sticks to itself). Can you see why it's so annoying? This is why it's so incredibly difficult to clean off of animals who've been effected by oil spills.This is also why oil causes such a problem to animals and to the whole ecology of the ocean environment. 

source: boston.com/bigpicture

You see, being cohesive, the oil does not let things penetrate the service it is spreading across. For example, if the oil is spreading across the ocean, oxygen cannot get through to the water underneath and carbon dioxide can't get out. A similar effect occurs on the skin of animals when they are covered in oil. Their skin is literally unable to breath. 

So anyway, we have this oil spreading across the ocean just being a douche. Because air (and sunlight) cannot penetrate the ocean's surface basically everything in the ocean starts dying. Obviously it's a little bit more complicated than just everything instantly dying but basically there is a snowball effect on the environment; Fish begin dying because there's no oxygen for them to breath, then those decaying fish get eaten by algae who don't need as much oxygen to survive, those algae start to multiply and suddenly they're taking up more oxygen than the fish originally needed to breath, then those algae are eaten by other algae who need less oxygen to breath and - do you see where I'm going with this? Basically, it becomes like the environment is aging prematurely. Instead of this happening over years on a small scale it happens over a very short space of time on a large scale. It can take years for the environment to recover after being affected by an oil spill.

So now you know why oil is such a pain in the ass for the environment and everyone involved in cleaning up an oil spill. =D
Hopefully you found it as interesting as I did! 

This actually didn't take as long to write as I thought it would... I was worried this would become some long entry about oil spills and you'd all get bored and what not but it didn't so yay! - Unless you're already bored in which case I don't want to be your friend anymore.