Spread of Oil Slicks on a Natural Body of Water

Simple power laws governing the rate of spread of oil slicks on water are derived after relaxing two restrictive assumptions made in the analyses existing in the literature, namely that of an instantaneous release of the oil and that of laminar flow in the underlying water layers. Hydrodynamic forces acting on the slick are discussed, as are the effects of ambient turbulence. It is found that the simple phenomenological and order-of-magnitude arguments used here do not yield the values of the numerical coefficients in the power law relationships. Instead, the values of these coefficients have to be determined from data obtained in laboratory experiments.