Auburn Engineering received national visibility when faculty members Prabhakar Clement and Joel Hayworth in the Department of Civil Engineering were featured in National Geographic daily news to discuss finding traces of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill on the sands of Orange Beach, Ala., as recently as February. The researchers have been investigating the effects of the oil spill on Alabama’s Gulf coast since 2010. “We could have collected as many tar balls as we wanted, from less than one centimeter up to four centimeters — or .4 to 1.6 inches — in diameter,” Clement told National Geographic. “And these are really soft tar balls that are decaying, so there are probably also millions of tiny fragments that we can’t even see. I collected over 1,000 tar balls within [an area of] about 10 miles in five hours. What does that mean? I don’t know. What are the health ramifications? I don’t know. But this clearly demonstrates the magnitude of the [ongoing] problem attributable to Deepwater Horizon.”