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The world watched in horror as images of once pristine beaches became coated in oil and thousands of species of birds struggled to survive in the wake of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

But upsetting images of the 'worst environmental disaster the U.S. has faced' provided one physicist with the inspiration to devise a faster and more thorough way of mopping up spilled oil.

It took Arden Warner just hours to come up with a method of magnetising oil so that the environmentally damaging fluid could be collected using a magnet.

Arden Warner came up with the idea for magnetising oil after seeing the wide-reaching effects of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill (pictured in this satellite image). In his garage, he worked out the best size magnetic particles to mix with oil, in order to be able to move it using a magnet

Dr Warner, of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois, saw the benefits of placing magnetic material in an oily solution instead of adding extra man-made chemicals to water.

'Apply a magnetic field, and the particles will line up in the direction of the field. Orthogonally to that direction, the fluid becomes more rigid, and you can move or manipulate, it,' he told PopSci. 

Taking to his garage, the physicist shaved iron off a shovel and mixed the filings with engine oil before trying to move the solution with a magnet.

It worked, which led to hours experimenting with different fuels and size of filings.

'When I started on it, I couldn't sleep for days,' he said.

Dr Warner discovered that magnetic dust measuring between two and six microns across worked well in over 100 different types of oil.

Crude oil is naturally thick so that it does not flow easily but could be magnetised and cleaned up with a magnet.

He worked out that the size of magnetic particles can be chosen depending on how deep they need to travel into the oily water in order to bond with it.

Using this technique, he said: 'You can pull oil from the bottom.'

This could be done on a large scale by using an electromagnetic boon. 

The magnetic dust could later be extracted from the oil and re-used, he explained.

Dr Warner has used his technique to clean and oily bird and believes that one day it could help clean huge areas of coastline, like those polluted by the spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

While the accelerator physics lab helped Dr Warner patent his process, he has now received interest from other parties that may want to commercialise it.