Field sampling on Wednesday was pretty sweet. We went out into the "badyia" (the north-eastern desert) on the highway between Zarqua and Azraq. The highway goes from Amman towards the Iraqi border, so we were pretty far out there.
We found two sites where oil was spilled; the first was along the side of the road at a truck stop area. There was a good amount of oil left there, especially considering that it doesn't take much to contaminate a large area.
So, we took some pictures there and did some investigative-detective work, asking some of the truck drivers around there if they knew where we could find more. They told us a little bit of information and so we kept on hunting.
I don't think we found the exact place that one of the truckers told us about (we went the way he told us, but didn't find much) but further down the highway we found a site that had a huge amount of oil.
We walked around the site a little bit and took some pictures. The amount of oil that is just sitting there is pretty incredible.
We talked to a Bedouin who was right there with his sheep (the spilling area was in a government created water-retention area and was right beside a little pool and a stream area where the sheep were drinking water...) and asked him if he knew where the oil came from. He said that he thought that an oil tanker had crashed there, and that they had cleaned up the truck, but just left the oil.
We think that he was probably right, because there's just a ton of oil, but we think that there's a GOOD possibility that it is also a place where people regularly dump their oil. Its really wierd. There were filters and things of that nature all around the area, which suggested that maybe an auto repair/oil changing shop brought their excess oil there. But we still think that average truckers would stop there along the side of the road to dump their oil.
The site is pretty fucked up; in the United States, they'd have it cleaned up in a minute, before any of it could even soak into the soil, let alone maybe get into the water aquifer. It appeared that the oil had been there for a long time, as you could see the oil seeping through the layers of the sedimentary rock (which is pretty incredible), and the soil in the area was pretty saturated.
Not only is it bad because of just spilling the oil, but its location is probably the worst place where it could be. When it rains, the entire area floods and is held by a dam, and now that the oil is there the water will just get contaminated.
So we took a bunch of pictures and collected soil samples to do some analysis before we went to Azraq to get some lunch. My dad and his colleague are going to try to give a presentation on it next month, which should be cool.
Azraq is just over 200 km (~125 mi) from the Iraqi border, and just over 50 km (~30 mi) from the Saudi Arabian border, which is pretty incredible.
Anyways, it was an exciting day. Enjoy the pictures.
