I’m wondering why, rather than trying to disperse the oil, an attempt to absorb it isn’t being made? Seems as though if they were to dump paper products into the spill, it would be fairly easy to scoop the waste up, without allowing the oil to get to the shore.
That is being done. People are sending their hair! You put the hair in nylon tubes which float on the surface, absorb the oil and then are removed. There are collection sites in quite a lot of places. Check your local paper.
suggestion box
Like the other zillion suggestions being made from the sidelines, this one neglects how incredibly huge the extent of the spill is. The oil now covers thousands of square miles. You can’t “easily” do anything for a problem that covers thousands of square miles.
It’s like the suggestions for solving the energy problem. There is no one solution. Many, many different solutions that vary depending on place and conditions will be necessary.
The hair solution is an interesting one (hair would obviously behave better in ocean water than paper!) but the reality is that while the hair is being collected (and then processed into giant tubes: they’re not proposing just to dump hair into the ocean) nobody has yet used it.
Even if you managed to get a mile’s worth of hair tubing into the ocean, that would be the barest start on a slick that has a boundary of several hundred miles.