Putting the Oil Spill in perspective

Posted on August 25, 2010 by Oscar Gordon

Since Phil mentioned it

Picture your neighbor’s pool.  Unless you live in Malibu, it’ll contain about 6,000 gallons.  That’s the “Gulf” for purposes of discussion.  Now go to your garage, get a quart of oil and pour it in when he’s not looking.  Pretty good sense of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, right?

Nope, not even close.  Put a drop of that oil onto a sheet of paper and carefully cut it in half.  Now do it again and toss that quarter of a drop into the deep end.  Even this quarter droplet (about the size of the comma in this sentence) is about 10% too large, but NOW you have a sense of what 4.9 million barrels of oil in the Gulf looks like.[1]

Now that we’ve grappled with the issue of scale, let’s look at the aftermath of this ‘catastrophe.’  According to the government scientists, seventy-five percent of that sliver of a droplet has now evaporated, been eaten by microbes, skimmed or burnt. (This estimate is in dispute, but every day the released oil is being reduced to get to that figure, if not beyond it.)

Now, you’re going to need to borrow your kid’s microscope for the rest of this exercise….

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2 Responses to Putting the Oil Spill in perspective

  1. Rivrdog says:
    August 25, 2010 at 8:22 am

    Just one question: Since, prior to the Gulf Spill, the US Coast Guard standard was to NEVER allow the use of dispersants to reduce sea-surface petroleum, how come they “relented” this time and allowed the use of well over a million gallons of dispersant?

    BTW, for those uninitiated in the ways of the water, oil on the surface is a problem in one dimension, but if you disperse it with surfactants, it becomes a problem in three dimensions, throughout the water column.

    I hope the very next marina operator caught and ticketed with the usual $5,000 citation for spritzing a slight spill of fuel at a fuel dock with detergent gets a good sea lawyer, and that lawyer goes to the USCG’s “environmental court”, and tells that court that if it was good enough for ADM Thad Allen, why isn’t it good enough for Joe’s Marina?

    The problem is that the 75% “gone” figure was pulled out of the Obama Administration’s ass. I’ll buy that 75% of the oil is gone from the ocean’s surface, and thereby “out of sight”. Two major environmental studies, one by some chaps from Woods Hole Oceanographic and one from the University of Georgia’s environment lab, have said, nazzofast, Presidente, let’s LOOK for that oil. Well, guess what, they found a bunch of it, a giant plume, on the bottom of an undersea canyon, a mile or more down, and 22 miles long, and the PLUME IS MOVING!

    The oil isn’t GONE, it only evaporates slowly, far too slowly to have much of it “gone”. It moved on, out of sight, conveniently for the Obama Administration, who was suffering mightily because of that particular albatross around it’s neck.

    Yes, Mother Earth has huge powers of self-healing, and will eventually get over even this huge spill. We shouldn’t let the Government bamboozle us with phony claims, though.

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