Can a Little Oil Really Calm the Ocean?

today I'm going to show you how to literally calm the waves of the ocean in November 1883 a large ship named The Grecian set sell from Philadelphia to Brazil it was severely overloaded so when it hit a storm several hundred miles offshore it started taking on water due to the large breaking waves through sheer luck they saw another ship traveling from New York to London the Martha cob they raised the flag n over V which meant I'm sinking to which the Martha Cobb replied with the code H over J which means Lifeboat cannot come the Martha Cobb only had a 16t Lifeboat and the storm was still too strong and the large and breaking waves would easily sink the small boat that they'd have to use to Tender the men from the grean however the captain of the Martha cob Thomas Greenbank had an idea that would ultimately save the life of everyone on board the Grecian he grabbed a 5 gallon drum of fish oil that happened to be on board and he dumped it over the side of the ship into the waters after about 20 minutes Witnesses describe a magical event the the breaking waves were calmed around both vessels and the Lifeboat was able to rescue all 10 men from the sinking grean but could this really be true does oil actually calm Rough Waters and if so how okay it's a cold windy day here at the reservoir I'm going to see if this Alaskan salmon oil can actually calm the wind waves on the lake this is fish oil that you can buy at the pet store to feed your dog it's also the same thing that you can take as a healthy omega-3 supplement so this type of oil doesn't harm the environment I'm going to start at where the wind's blowing and see if it calms the waves away from me this is a good view now I was over there where that guy is that's where I put the oil in look at it one spoonful of oil that is crazy it's calmed the whole lake right there it's like glass where the oil was looks like it's ice after a few minutes the wind had blown the oil slick towards the center of the lake okay you can see there's the oil spot now moving across the lake so there's waves before not where the oil is and after okay I'm just going to put some on the snow here going to throw it out [Music] there look at that it's moving down it's a little bit easier to see the effect when I put it in fast motion motion so watch me start putting it in and don't mind me slipping a few times as I try to film it but you can see the smoothness spread out in a semicircle from where I put it in look at the Circle spreading out that is so [Music] crazy but how could this small amount of material on top of the water make such a difference and how would it be enough to calm giant waves in the ocean well first let's talk about how waves form on the ocean initially the wind blows across the surface of the water and there are small vortices that form at the surface due to turbulence causing indentations in the water that are very small at first these are called capillary waves they start off less than 2 cm in height but now because these waves are sticking up more than the rest of the water the wind pushes on those crests even more which causes the waves to grow even more eventually those waves can grow larger than 100 ft tall and once those wind waves move out of the area where the wind's blowing we call them swell waves swell waves have a regular pattern but both of these types of waves started as wind waves so if you want to stop the giant ocean waves you have to start with the small capillary waves first so how does a few nanometers of oil on the top of water stop capillary waves well before we explain the mechanism let me tell you about the sponsor for this video ground news ground news is a we website and app developed by a former NASA engineer on a mission to give readers an easy datadriven objective way to read the news I've been using ground news to make sure I'm well informed and avoid bias reporting ground news has access to over 50,000 news sources that allow you to compare headlines and every story comes with a quick visual breakdown of the political bias factuality and ownership of the sources reporting all backed by ratings from three Independent News monitoring organizations one of my favorite featur features of ground news is the blind spot feed which highlights stories that are disproportionately covered by one side of the political Spectrum this is really important because it reveals the division in our media landscape so we can better understand where people are coming from and why they hold the beliefs they do so I encourage all of you to check out the link in my description ground. news/ actionlab to better understand what's happening in the world around you you can subscribe through my link to get 30% off unlimited access to the platform with the Vantage subscription which is about $6 a month and thanks to ground news for sponsoring this video now let's get back to the experiment the type of oil that I use was fish oil fish oil has a bunch of omega-3 fatty acids in it if you look at these molecules you'll notice that they have a polar and a non-polar end meaning that there's an end that's attracted to the water and the other one isn't so when you put fish oil in water it spreads out in a very thin layer on top of the water the side that's attracted to the water is in the water and the little Tails stick up away from the water they eventually form a monol layer on top of the water but when a small wave forms it causes the concentration of the oil on the water to be more concentrated near the peaks of the wave this means that the surface tension near the tip is lower than at the base and this surface tension gradient causes a stress that makes the wave flatten out this stress is called the marangoni stress this is the effect that happens whenever you have areas of different surface tension in a liquid this causes a flow to occur from low to high surface tension the marangoni flow can easily be seen when you have two liquids with different surface tensions touching each other like water and alcohol what's interesting about this fact is it's not the surface tension changing that causes the waves to be damped but it's the gradient of surface tension that happens when waves try to form in fact scientists have found that when there's too much oil in the water or too much surfactant then the effect doesn't happen at all it doesn't damp the waves this ability for the oil to smooth the ocean's surface is so well known that there's an expression that you might have heard before to pour oil on Troubled Water means to soothe or calm down someone or a situation this literally stems from the fact that Sailors used to use oil to calm Troubled Waters but the type of oil wasn't always well known for example during World War II mineral oil was typically used to calm Waters but it doesn't have the same effect because the molecules tend to group together but fish oil and different types of vegetable oil are repelled from each other so they rapidly spread out across the surface reaching basically a monol layer on top from my own experiments it's clear that the small capillary waves are damped from the oil slick on top but can that really stop giant waves from forming on the ocean well there have been many published studies that show natural oil slicks damping waves and other studies where they put fish oil on the ocean and see it damping the waves along with many other anecdotal stories like I mentioned at the beginning of this video but how you can see that if I put fish fish oil on these waves that are more significant than capillary waves nothing happens so how could oil be expected to stop a 10 m wave from crashing well the answer lies in the details of how wind waves form as waves grow they create turbulence in the surrounding air this turbulence is a result of the friction between the air and the water's surface so turbulence in turn affects the surface roughness of the Waves as turbulence intensifies it contributes to the breaking of the waves and the generation of White Caps White Caps and breaking waves further increase the surface roughness so the interaction between turbulence and surface roughness is a feedback loop rougher surfaces lead to more turbulence and increased turbulence influences the surface roughness larger surface roughness enhances the capture of wind energy leading to increased wave heights so if you can reduce the overall roughness of the wave you can change the wind profile of that section of the ocean if the roughness of the water is reduced and the overall turbulence of the wind is reduced this total effect is to reduce the overall growth of waves so the bigger patch of oil slick you have the greater you'll affect the wind in a local area reducing the waves in that area in the story at the beginning about the Martha Cobb scientists have analyzed this and showed that the oil would have spread out over a 3 to 6 kilometer region this changed the equilibrium of wind and wavelength in that region and the waves quickly died out as a result this effect is one of my favorite examples of how some of the largest effects in life are built from small effects and thanks for watching another episode of the action lab I hope you learned something if you haven't subscribed to my channel yet remember to hit that subscribe button and we'll see you next [Music] time

Channel: The Action Lab

Views: 508,134

Keywords: biggest wave, oil calming the sea, the action lab, oil in water, science, chemistry, physics

Id: RST_ylwVrUw

Length: 10min 0sec (600 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 15 2024