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WILKES-BARRE — So, our first two ingredients are vegetable oil and cocoa. What are we making?
“This will be your synthetic crude oil,” Wilkes University Environmental Engineering and Earth Science Assistant Professor Holly Frederick told a room full of middle-school girls stirring the oil and cocoa together Monday. “This is cooking oil and we’re making it look like crude oil, and it will smell like chocolate.”
Frederick headed the “clean up an oil spill” session of Wilkes’ week-long “Women Empowered by Science Camp.” Most of the tweens and early teens in the Cohen Science Center room had just finished the “solar oven” experiment outside; pizza boxes lined inside with aluminum foil and a flap pulled up to reflect sun inward sat under their lab tables.
“It melted the chocolate faster than I expected,” 13-year-old Cassie Menn said of the success in making a S’more in her cardboard oven.
Frederick talked about some of the world’s biggest oil spills, but much of it was pre-history to her charges. “Anyone ever hear of the Exxon Valdez?” she asked, evoking motionless silence. Which shouldn’t have been a surprise; the notorious tanker spill polluted Alaskan shores 26 years ago. That’s at least twice as long as these young women have been alive.
The students perked up once the fake spill experiment got going: Pour the oil-cocoa concoction into a plastic bag, seal it, use small rocks to weight it to the bottom of a large aluminum rectangular pan, add a pile of sand for a “beach” and pour in water. Then Frederick and her assistants started snipping the bags with scissors.
“You can cut it any way you want,” she said when one student urged caution. “Life is chaos!”
As Madalynn Gregory prodded her baggie to nudge more cocoa crude out, one of Frederick’s assistants scraped the bowl that had been used to mix the oil, plopping drops straight into the water.
“It looks like someone pooped in the ocean from above!” Madalynn giggled.
Cassie followed suit, scraping oil from her team’s mixing bowl into the water, which had been jostled so much the beach morphed into submerged sandbar.
“We’re ocean murderers!” she laughed.
Frederick explained the three variations commonly used to clean up oil spills: Containment with floating material, skimming it off the top of the water, and burning it. That last, she added, creates billowing black clouds of toxic smoke.
“We’re not going to do that one today,” she said
The students attempted to contain their oil spills using string, yarn and a plastic straw, then to skim it off the top with an eyedropper, putting the recovered oil in a small beaker to measure. Most found the recovery process difficult, something Frederick said reflects real life. Despite best efforts, only about 10 percent of the Valdez oil spill was recovered.
So, since the idea of the week-long event is to get more young women interested in science, is anyone reconsidering their likely career choices?
“I actually like science,” Cassie beamed, “But I’m going to be a baker.”
A baker?
Our first two ingredients are vegetable oil and cocoa. What are we making?
