Oil spills are an unavoidable part of our future on this planet. Until we no longer have to rely on the messy stuff, we will still have to pump oil and ship it around the world, and drilling and shipping inevitably means spills.
In this season of Upgrade, we head out to Fermilab, the nation’s premier particle physics laboratory, to talk to Arden Warner. Warner, whose day job as a physicist consists of colliding high speed particles together, thought of a unique way to clean up oil spills—using magnets.
Warner said he figured there had to be a way to organically magnetize spilled oil, which could then be magnetically collected. He showed us how to do this by adding the naturally-occurring magnetic mineral magnetite to spilled oil, which allows that oil to more easily be manipulated and captured than by other methods. We also take a look at how he has implemented these simple principles into an electromagnetic boom that could be used to change the future of oil spill recovery.
Check out The 20-Year Old With a Plan to Rid the Sea of Plastic:
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