Published on Jul 7, 2010 A little science le

A little science lesson... you can detect oil and hydrocarbons using a simple black light, as it turns out that oil glows in UV light. The camera doesn't particularly like taking video in this light range so some of the fluorescence doesn't show up as good as in real life. All of the oil samples were very visibly glowing although the transmission fluid was a darker orange compared to the others. Would be fun to carry a black light down to the beach and see what shows up at night with the tarballs.