Abstract
New research suggests that oil spills in cold locations with lots of sun exposure could play out much differently than warm-water spills, such as the one that followed the Deepwater Horizon explosion in 2010. Last week at the ACS Spring 2023 meeting, Danielle Haas Freeman , a PhD candidate at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, detailed how sunlight-driven photooxidation could leave a larger-than-expected fraction of spilled oil suspended on the surface of cold water. “What that means is that you would have more oil to clean up, and then you’d also end up with potentially more oil reaching sensitive coastal ecosystems,” said Collin P. Ward , a geochemist at Woods Hole who led the study. Freeman and Ward looked at the physical properties governing two different pathways for oil to be removed naturally from the water’s surface: entrainment, a process in which oil gets broken up and drawn down into the
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