Some Perspective on the Oil

Some Perspective on the Oil

Posted by Lew Rockwell on June 11, 2010 09:25 AM

Writes Daniel Mahaffey:

Just for fun, I looked at how fast the Gulf of Mexico is filling with oil.

The Gulf's volume is approximately 2.5 quadrillion cubic meters, 660 quadrillion gallons (660,000,000,000,000,000 gallons) or 600,000 cubic miles.

Estimates of the oil released vary from 40 million to 100 million gallons. Let's use 66 million gallons to make the arithmetic easy.

The amount of oil released is 1/10,000,000,000 of the volume of the Gulf (one ten billionth).

If it has taken 53 days to release 66 million gallons, it will take 530,000,000,000 days to fill the Gulf of Mexico. That's 1.45 billion years.

If the earth is 4.54 billion years old, it would take 1/3 the life of the earth to fill the Gulf.

If the universe is 13.75 billion years old, it would take 1/10 the life of the universe to fill the Gulf.

Stop! This is not possible. Here's another view:

Tiber field (on which the platform was drilling) contains 250,000,000 barrels of oil (at 42 gallons per barrel).

At 66 million gallons per 53 day period, it would take 8,400 days to drain Tiber field (23 years).

If emptied, Tiber field would cover the 615,000 square miles of the Gulf surface with 0.00098 (about 1/1000) inch of oil after 23 years.

The point of all this is perspective. We are very small so everything looks big to us. When journalists report massive oil plumes underwater, or foot deep oil collections on shore, we should be aware that things are still very, very small relative to the enormity of the Gulf of Mexico. The plumes may not actually be massive, and the oil may not be 1 foot deep everywhere. None of this is intended to excuse BP­it's just perspective.

UPDATE from Roland Walkenhorst:

Thanks so much to you and Daniel for the perspective. That's the question I've had in mind for weeks now: "How many gallons of water are in the Gulf of Mexico?" I was too lazy to look it up myself.

I think I heard an NBC reporter the other day lamenting the loss of some 260 turtles, after we were treated again to pictures of the same pitiful oil-soaked birds we've been seeing every evening.

Heck, we have only about 350 acres here, and I'll bet there are more turtles than that on our property. It surely seems that way when they're eating the ripe tomatoes in the garden. (Two words, turtles: ELECTRIC FENCE!)

Sad to see that so many people think God made our world so junky that it can't heal itself from our relatively small misadventures.