 some of these methods I was talking about earlier putting down these physical barriers some estimates say that that can at maximum only take up about 40% of the oil so you can still see the effects of oil spills that happened decades ago today there are some places in the world where you might go on the beach and you can sort of see these tarry black grains of sand and sometimes that's the residue from oil spills in the past and you know countries are still cleaning up now