Because I was curious, I did the following quick math over the weekend.
This is NOT intended to trivialize the tragic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, but rather to show just how tremendously fragile our ecosystem is and how very careful we have to be to jealously guard and defend our planet.
The estimated volume of salt water in the Gulf of Mexico is 650 Quadrillion Gallons (650,000,000,000,000,000 gallons)
The BP oil spill has dumped approximately 180 million gallons of crude oil (neglecting anything that has been skimmed or recovered).
This means the Gulf is now 0.000000028% oil.
This is the equivalent of dropping 10 drops of crude oil out of an eyedropper into an Olympic sized swimming pool.
Yikes!
Notes:
Olympic sized swimming pool = 2,500,000 liters
Average drop from an eyedropper is .07cm^3
Comments
- sitemap
- careers
- contact
- privacy & terms
- follow on
© Design Concepts 2012
Thanks for your heads up on my math typo on the WikiAnswers page. I had actually corrected my math on my blog when I caught the mistake but failed to go back to the WikiAnswers page and fix it there.
While the LSM (Lame Stream Media) made a HUGE deal of Tony Hayward’s comment, “The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume…”, it seems Tony Hayward was correct and the LSM was showing their left-wing leanings once again!
The Persian Gulf survived 500 MILLION gallons of oil dumped into it by Saddam Hussein’s troops in the 90′s and the Gulf Of Mexico will survive this spill…. just like it survived the 1979-1980 Ixtoc 1 spill of 150 Million gallons. God created oil eating bacteria because He knew man would screw up from time to time.