Nature News - Latest Comments in World's slowest-moving drop caught on camera at last

Re: World's slowest-moving drop caught on camera at last

James Demers — Fri, 09 Aug 2013 03:38:00 -0000

If the XL pipeline dumps a few hundred tons of this stuff on the landscape, dissolved in a volatile solvent, the cleanup will be an interesting exercise.

Re: World's slowest-moving drop caught on camera at last

Raymond Borges — Sun, 04 Aug 2013 13:25:39 -0000

I did not see any moment where the drop was not touching either the bottom or top surface. So technically speaking, the drop never fell. The substance just stretched until it touched the bottom substance and then broke off from the top.

Re: World's slowest-moving drop caught on camera at last

Jean SmilingCoyote — Tue, 23 Jul 2013 16:13:10 -0000

A very nice article to read. I'm glad the technology exists and worked. With reference to James Vance's comment, when I learned about the Athabsca deposit in college years ago, we were taught "tar sands" instead of the misleading "oil sands."

Re: World's slowest-moving drop caught on camera at last

James Vance — Thu, 18 Jul 2013 15:35:51 -0000

This experiment's media is pretty much the same chemical compound being mined in the Athabascan tar sands of Canada (that promoters and proponents insist on calling "oil sands") which, once extracted from the sand matrix by steam-heated softening and liquefaction then mixed with refined petroleum solvents to form a synthetic crude oil liquid, would be shipped through the proposed Keystone XL pipeline (if its cross-border construction is approved by the US government) to Gulf Coast refineries.