news.yahoo.com — Drip by drip, day by day, the oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico is adding up to mind-boggling numbers. Using worst case scenarios calculated by scientists, a month's worth of leaking oil could fill enough gallon milk jugs to stretch more than 11,300 miles. That's more than the distance from New York to Buenos Aires, Argentina, and back...
May 21, 2010 View in Crawl 4
plastichotdogMay 22, 2010
This is a pretty confusing article. I don't really consider "gyms" to be a very useful unit of volume. And how do you come up with a number like 102 and then say "at worst" which means it's obviously an estimation?
Closed AccountMay 22, 2010
it would be 0.00125 gulfs of mexicos
footbag01May 22, 2010
All of a sudden, this seems interesting...The total collection of all the gold that has been found on Earth would make a cube of 40 feet.
falserMay 22, 2010
How many of your mom's is that?
zombiesocietyMay 22, 2010
I'm glad this is getting buried because you posted it before I could. I thought it was relevant. Now I'll be right back with....a hammock of cake.
mrmudgeonMay 22, 2010
Stupid journalist tricks. It guess that it makes better copy though than something like, 'The oil spilled in the gulf of Mexico is now one millionth of one percent of the water'.Whatever.
partrowMay 22, 2010
Who would want to fill 102 gyms with oil? Has anyone ever filled a gym with oil? And how large is a "gym" ?Do writers who use these 8th grade analogies think that the population cannot understand units of measure?It always has to be "X footballs fields long", or "enough to stretch from here to the moon X times".Who figures these moronic measurements, and why do they have to dumb them down ?
regariusMay 23, 2010
I hope you're joking. Nothing short of a nuke would have any chance of sealing it off (and when anyone brings up nukes, which I have a couple times in discussion, everyone freaks out even though it seems like a workable solution)... and 'dumping tons of s**t on it' would do absolutely nothing but bury the leak and make it harder to get to -- it'd still be leaking! You could pile a thousand feet of dirt on top of it and all it'd do is take a little time for it to show up again... but instead of a few small leaks, you'd have a few thousand spread over a large area... leaking the same amount or MORE if the BOP was further damaged trying your 'dump s**t on it' method.The pressure of the oil coming out is FAR too great to "cap" unless they could do it cleanly on an undamaged portion of casing -- something that obviously doesn't exist since the casing fell to the ocean floor. If they tried to cap the main hole right now, it'd just cause one of the smaller leaks to become bigger.. or increase the pressure on already damaged areas until they break open and leak even more than it is now.I can't believe people really think they're trying to "save" the oil from the well... do any of you have any idea how many thousands of oil wells there are and how much money BP is losing in potential clean up and lawsuits every single day from the oil that's leaking and how that overwhelmingly dwarfs the profits from any one well? If they could shut it off cleanly they would have done so IMMEDIATELY. They can't.It's like half the people commenting think we get our entire supply of oil from a couple dozen wells.Just looked up statistics... the Gulf of Mexico ALONE produces 1.7 MILLION barrels a day.