It looks like we are gold digging in a laboratory setting. Kind of. We're looking for black gold, understand oil, in its plastic concretion broken down into tiny particles that we try to catch under the microscope, improvising ways to make plastics legible to the human eye. The samples were taken in Meech Lake and Rideau Canal. We bleached the material with peroxide, let it set for several days, filtered with nylon cloth, and put under the light of the microscope. We look for the material qualities, its color, shape and resistance to the tweezers pressure, which may betray its presence among the rocks. We eventually found a few traces of plastics, like this green particle in the photograph below.