Math geeks: If the gulf of Mexico were an olympic sized pool,

[cliffordu]

how much oil would be floating around due to the spill???


I'm trying to get a sense of scale....

[Subdivisions]

1. A 24oz beer can. n/t

[cliffordu]

2. that much??

PBR or Heineken??

I figured more along the lines of 2 or three ounces....

[Subdivisions]

3. A full beer can. Brand doesn't matter. n/t

[Subdivisions]

7. I figured more along the lines of 2 or three ounces...

Actually, you may be right. Now that I'm thinking about it, I may have mixed my analogies. The 24oz beer can is right but it might be compared to Cowboys Stadium and not an oplympic pool. But either comparison I think is adequate to illustrate the relative scale.

This is not to say that a very little oil by volume cannot itself be very destructive and harmful. It very clearly has been.

[cliffordu]

11. I completely agree that ANY oil in the food chain is too much

but I was one of the hysterics that screamed that the gulf was dead a couple of weeks ago and have calmed down since....

I had just never thought about the REAL math involved.

It'll still be a while before I eat any gulf shrimp.....dammit.....

[damntexdem]

36. We still don't know the long-term effects on the Gulf.

We still don't know for sure that the capping of the well will work, especially in the long run.

[hfojvt]

21. I kinda would like for you to show your work

What, for example, is the volume of the Gulf?

Heck, I don't even know the volume of the pool. I suppose I could calculate it 50 meters by 20 meters by 2 meters = 2000 cubic meters = 2,000,000 liters of water. If I am remembering that right. Is a liter, 1000 cubic centimeters?

[Subdivisions]

29. Not my calculations. I got it from CNBC...

http://www.cnbc.com/id/38294088/What_Does_184_Million_Gallons_of_Oil_Look_Like?slide=8

Image 9 of 12.

[hfojvt]

30. oh lord, the M$M?

you cannot trust them to add 2 + 2 and get, or report, the correct answer.

[Subdivisions]

34. I know, I know. My post #1 should have ended with a question mark and not a period. n/t

[Cirque du So-What]

32. And I was gonna ask you to show your work!

Not really. I'm gonna shop around for a second opinion, however - an opinion from a source other than the corporate media.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

31. The volume of the Gulf is 2.5x10^15 cubic meters.

An Olympic size swimming pool is 2,500,000 L.

[slackmaster]

4. I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation yesterday

Off the top of my head, the volume of the Gulf is about 643 quadrillion gallons.

If 200 million gallons of oil was evenly distributed (which of course it would not be), that would work out to roughly .32 parts per billion.

ETA Wikipedia gives the volume of an Olympic size pool as 2,500 cubic meters, which is 2,500,000,000 cubic centimeters. One part per billion in a swimming pool would therefore be about 2.5 cc. Take a third of that, about an eyedropper full of oil. (Specifically, 2.5 * .32 = .8).

http://www.epa.gov/gmpo/about/facts.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympic-size_swimming_pool

[bbinacan]

8. That certainly puts

things in perspective.

[slackmaster]

10. It's very difficult to wrap one's mind around such large numbers, but consider one thing...

...Organic pollutants in marine environments tend to accumulate in organisms, at higher concentrations as you go up the food chain.

It's not a lot of oil compared to the volume of water, but it's still a lot of oil in terms of potential impact on food.

[cliffordu]

13. Right - people will be swimming all over the gulf beaches

way before the shrimp are safe again...

Sure glad this hasn't happened where the Salmon fatten up.........

[hootinholler]

45. No just the Atlantic Bluefin Tuna's breeding grounds

During the spawn at that. We could have lost a generation of this dwindling fish.

-Hoot

[slackmaster]

47. I ate some Australian Bluefin last night

It was pretty good.

[AngryAmish]

52. I'm not a food nazi, but I wish all people would stop eating bluefin for a while

Tasty, hell yes. But the stocks are so, so low right now. One meal does not mean they are going extinct but there was such success with the swordfish time out a few years ago. Give them a break, let the stocks get back up, then chow down.

[hfojvt]

25. had to laugh at your name in this context

There's an old joke/insult. If you took my brain and put it on the edge of a razor blade, it would be like a bb rolling down a four lane highway.

[bbinacan]

56. LOL. n/t

[Liberal_in_LA]

39. That doesn't seem to bad then.

[no limit]

44. So I guess a few tea spoons of Antrax in your water supply wouldn't seem that bad either.

[SidDithers]

55. Anthrax is not crude oil...

ETA: Apparently, simple logic really is hard.

Sid

[L0oniX]

46. When the parts per billion wash up on your shore, it doesn't matter.

[dipsydoodle]

53. Sounds about right

When the figure of 2 million gallons of Corexit used became apparent I also worked out that with even distribution that represented 1 : 20,000,000 parts water.

[cleanhippie]

57. That is only part of the equation....

The math certainly scales down the size to something that we can wrap our heads around, but it does not scales down the size of the lifeforms that live in the Gulf.
Saying that if the Gulf were a pool, then the oil would be an eydropper full seems ok if the lifeforms are at original scale, but that is not the case.

Trying to scale down the gulf into more manageable numbers only serves to diminish the impact THAT MUCH OIL is/will have in the Gulf in real size.

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

5. So, do we have some 50-mile high pool boys available?

[cliffordu]

6. Well.....

:rofl:

[blondeatlast]

26. If so, let me know, please! nt

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

27. You'd be disappointed

I hear their peckers are only 500 ft long.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

9. About 0.78 milliliters.

About an eyedropper full.

[slackmaster]

15. Hey, we ended up in the same ballpark

My calculation comes out to about .80 ml.

[cliffordu]

18. Will you guys do my taxes??

[lame54]

12. Non - it would all evaporate

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

14. The light weight hydrocarbons would indeed evaporate.

If the pool were filled with seawater and the proper microoganisms, more of it would biograde.

And this all would work faster if you added a little bit of detergent that eye dropper of oil in the olympic size swimming pool.

[cliffordu]

17. IIRC, there's plenty of detergent (and dog poop)

being sluiced into the gulf from the Mississippi river, so maybe there are ecological advantages here I hadn't been thinking about........

[lame54]

19. still not buying it...

that would mean Rush was right

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

22. Simple chemistry.

Science isn't influenced by what you want to believe based on politics.

[lame54]

35. Depends who's science you use...

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-long-will-oil-spill-last

More than 20 years after the Exxon Valdez foundered off the coast of Alaska, puddles of oil can still be found in Prince William Sound. Nearly 25 years after a storage tank ruptured, spilling oil into the mangrove swamps and coral reefs of Bahia Las Minas in Panama, oil slicks can still be found on the water. And more than 40 years after the barge Florida grounded off Cape Cod, dumping fuel oil, the muck beneath the marsh grasses still smells like a gas station...

...The oil from the Mississippi Canyon 252 well, which started leaking on April 20 when BP's Deepwater Horizon rig exploded, has been described as light, sweet crude, meaning that it may contain more such compounds that dissolve in water or evaporate. "There are components that make up that oil that will have some affinity to dissolve into the water, but how fast and to what extent I just don't know at 5,000 feet in this incredibly turbulent flow," Reddy says. "It's not how much of the oil got spilled, it's the concentration and the duration—how much of the components that have bioactive tendencies are in the water and are going across the gills of fish and for how long?"

Already, scientists in the Gulf have found plumes of oil floating roughly 1,000 meters beneath the surface—rather than rushing to the surface from the more than 1,500-meter-deep well as anticipated. And that means some of these compounds are literally washing off the oil and into the water. "It's going to be taking hours to get up," Reddy says.

Once the oil reaches the surface, it begins to evaporate, losing as much as 20 to 40 percent of the original hydrocarbons. "Evaporation is good; it selectively removes a lot of compounds we'd rather not have in the water," like PAHs, Reddy notes. It also emulsifies, forming the now ubiquitous mousse—a frothy mix of hydrocarbons and water—or clumps into so-called tar balls, like those found on the shore of Dauphin Island in Alabama on May 12.

The properties of the oil also change depending on whether it is at the release point more than 1,500 meters down, directly above the leak at the surface or a few kilometers east or west as it drifts. But "light components can be more pervasive in finding ways to infiltrate a salt marsh and impacting for a long period of time," Reddy says. And that's where the real problems begin.

[slackmaster]

23. People who have said that nature would eventually take care of the problem are correct

People who say the spill hasn't caused any significant loss of higher marine life, or that it won't have serious effects on the food supply, or cause massive economic damage, may have spoken too soon.

[Xenotime]

24. Agreed. I don't want to give Rush any legitimate talking points.

[BadgerKid]

16. It's also 464 feet of oil on top of a US football field. n/t

[Statistical]

20. 1/40th of one ounce (or 0.8 ml). Math nerd math included

The Assumptions:
The gulf has roughly 643 quadrillion gallons (and wall exists that prevents flows in world's oceans).
http://www.epa.gov/gmpo/about/facts.html

The oil spill was roughly 200 million gallons of crude (4.9 billion barrels).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepwater_Horizon_oil_spill

An olympic swimming pool is 660,400 gallons.
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_much_water_does_an_Olympic_sized_swimming_pool_hold


The Work:
643 quadrillion gallons = 643,000 trillion gallons = 643,000,000 billion gallons = 643,000,000,000 million gallons.

643,000,000,000 million gallons of seawater : 200 million gallon of crude oil
3,215,000,000 water : 1 oil

The oil is one part per 3,215,000,000 (3.3 billion) parts water.

An Olympic swimming pool contains roughly 660,430 gallons of water.
660,400 * (1/3,215,000,000) = 0.000205421 gallons.
0.000205421 * 128 oz per gallon = ~0.025 oz.

The Answer:
Roughly 1/40th of an oz. For the metric folks that is ~0.8 ml.

[cliffordu]

33. You win.

should have stayed in high school.

Check that: I should have stayed in Jr. high school.....

[Vickers]

28. For another sense of scale...there are over 4000 oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. n/t

[anarch]

37. don't forget, also, the Gulf is not a contained system like a pool

so some of that relatively tiny amount could even be considered further dispersed than would be possible in a swimming pool. So, it's like, practically nothing!

So basically off-shore drilling has been proven totally safe, and even the worst case disaster is not any kind of a big deal. I'm glad we can all agree on this now, and be proud of our government and BP for keeping us all safe.

[cliffordu]

41. Not my point at all. I just wanted

a sense of scale.

But go ahead and use my post to be an ass.

What kind of car do you drive, anyway??

[anarch]

43. I have no car

but that doesn't make any difference, I'm pretty sure I still have a tremendously huge carbon footprint just by living in the U.S.

As far as scale, I'd say this whole thing has fucked up people's lives about on the scale of a large hurricane, but with more lasting psychological (and probably other kinds of) damage. It won't really hurt the earth, per se (the environment will recover, probably faster than I had initially thought, thankfully...perhaps minus a couple of species, but still...and I couldn't be happier that the leak is stopped), but it has definitely hurt a lot of people, regardless of geological scale.

[Chulanowa]

38. Too bad for your point that it's not evenly distributed through the entire Gulf

But rather is concentrated on eastern portion of the US coast of the Gulf.

if we're using the olympic swimming pool, then all the oil would only be measured in the first three feet of water after the swimmer's starting line, to a depth of four feet, and only at about 1/3 the width of the pool.

So if we're putting all that oil (to scale, of course) into a 27 x 3 x 4 block of water, what's that turn into?

[Recursion]

48. Well, more importantly for us it's concentrating in the biomass in the gulf

which is a chunk of biomass we enjoy eating at reasonably low prices.

[slackmaster]

51. What "point"?

Math is a pure science. Every problem doesn't have to have a point.

[Uncle Joe]

40. Your equation is off because it's not the scale of the Gulf, it's the scale of the ecosystems

in the Gulf and those are much smaller, the coral being just one example.

Thanks for the thread, cliffordu.

[cliffordu]

42. You're welcome.

and thanks for helping keep it alive!

c

[cliffordu]

49. I wasn't snarking you - -

honest!!

:hi:

[Uncle Joe]

54. No worries,

peace to you, clfford.:hi:

[LearnedHand]

50. A friend of mine and I used that exact metaphor early on to guesstimate

We came up with 300 swimming pools -- and that was within the first few weeks of the spill