Poppy, a six-year-old springer spaniel with floppy brown ears and a tail that never seems to stop wagging, is by all accounts a very good dog. Her white, brown speckled nose has also made her something of a trailblazer.
Poppy, a six-year-old springer spaniel with floppy brown ears and a tail that never seems to stop wagging, is by all accounts a very good dog.In a first-of-its-kind study, Poppy was able to do something with ease that's proven far more challenging for humans and their machines: she sniffed out an oil spill submerged in water and trapped under ice.
For at least the past decade, dogs have been sniffing out oil spills in Canada, helping clean Nova Scotia's shores of tanker oil and one of the Prairies' most vital watersheds of a large pipeline spill. Poppy's first lake experiment came in October. From her perch on the flat bow of a motorboat, she successfully used her nose to locate cooking pans coated in diluted bitumen and submerged in the lake at depths of one, three and five metres, Palace said.
Poppy was dressed for success in the harsh sub-zero conditions, decked out in an all-orange outfit complete with a vest, leggings, booties and goggles. With her nose to the snow, she zigzagged her way across the ice. Oil spill-sniffing dogs provide a proven new tool that can overcome"many of the drawbacks of previous technology-driven solutions" and results that often provided"uncertain answers," he said.
"This is like the old story of the dog who chases a car and doesn't know what to do when he catches it. The challenge is that there's no way to effectively clean up a spill in the Arctic, even if you can find it because the Arctic is a very big place to search by smell," Keith Stewart wrote in a statement.
"I wish I had on Deepwater," said Owens, who was an adviser on the shoreline cleanup when BP's Deepwater Horizon offshore oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. This olfactory system – including a nose that can continuously sniff at a rate of between five and 10 times a second – has been a huge benefit for humanity.
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