Arctic oil: 1970 study holds surprises for how to clean up oil spill in ice

July 25, 2012

Good old-fashioned hay works great for cleaning up oil from ice and cold water, according to a decades-old study conducted by the U.S. Coast Guard off the Arctic Ocean coast years before Prudhoe Bay began supplying the nation with oil.
 
Hay is also way better than peat moss, which tends to break up easily, making it hard to distribute and hard to collect once oiled. The unusual study was conducted on a drifting ice floe southwest of Barrow in the Chukchi Sea in 1970 as the oil industry was ramping up plans to tap what would become the nation's largest oil field.
 
Forty-two years ago, it was OK under federal law to dump real oil into the water for such tests. Not tested at the time were skimmers, booms and synthetic absorbent pads for soaking up oil, some of the key tools used by industry today.

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