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A Little Perspective on the BP Spill

Despite media hysteria, Mother Gaia is really, really big and resilient place.

By: Steve Maley (Diary)  |  June 26th, 2010 at 09:33 AM  | 

RESIZE: AAA

The New Orleans Superdome is pretty big. According to an article this week in the Daily Advertiser (Lafayette, LA), the amount of oil spilled from the BP Macondo well so far would fill up one-seventh (1/7th) of the volume of the Superdome.

Here’s a view of the Superdome from the air, at a scale of 1:2,500. Note the bar for scale. (First four images from the online database of the Louisiana Department of Natural Resources, SONRIS.)

The view at 1:25,000 includes the Central Business District and the French Quarter, plus the Mississippi River Bridge. The box is the approximate outline of the previous photo.

At 1:250,000, the Dome is still visible.

At 1:1,200,000, the Dome is no longer a pixel. This view shows the lower Mississippi from Baton Rouge to the Gulf. Of particular interest are the extremely fragile coastal marshes and barrier islands.

And then, the satellite view:

Don’t get me wrong; just a few barrels of oil in the wrong place (like a pelican rookery) can be devastating. It fouls marshes and beaches.

But it’s good to keep the images above in mind when you see ridiculous crapola like this:

…or this:

But dumba$$3s like this are beyond help:

Cross-posted to VladEnBlog.

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COMMENTS

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  • erp617

    but how can one have any perspective on the BP Horizon spill when it hasn’t stopped spewing yet?

    Nothing I’ve read indicates that there’s anything in the works to stop it and Obama has taken absurd pains to stop efforts to even contain it — the Coast Guard calling the “unavailable” owners of the skimming barges to confirm there are life jackets aboard???? instead of boarding and making a visual check, stopping the building of berms, not bringing all available skimmers to the area and other measures to numerous to mention make it pretty clear that Obama is letting the hysteria and the disaster continue until the moment of maximum political value — say around Halloween when he’ll come forward to part the oil from the water in the same way that Moses parted the sea.

    Will voters be taken in by the master charlatan again? I wouldn’t bet against it.

    • patman2108

      I’ve read that the first relief well (2 are being drilled), is about 2000 ft from target depth. IF they hit their target, the leak can hopefully be sealed by August. As for the pictures, the gist is a tad misleading. Granted the horizontal footprint of the Superdome is small relative to the Gulf, but this isn’t taking into account the volumetric capacity of the Dome, i.e. its vertical height. In other words, how large would be the footprint measured with a vertical oil height of say .25 inches (a hell of a lot of oil on a water surface) rather than oil filling 1/7th of the Superdome?

      • http://vladenblog.tumblr.com Vladimir

        …assuming 40,000 bbls per day for 70 days, and no evaporation, a cumulative spill of 2.8 million barrels would cover some 27 square miles to a depth of 0.25 inches.

        Oil on the water spreads much thinner than 0.25 inch.

        The overall size of the spill has been compared to South Carolina, about 31,000 sq miles. If none of the oil has evaporated, the *average* thickness is 0.000018 inch.

        Of course, the problem is that the stuff is not uniformly spread. The light stuff has evaporated, and the heavy stuff clumps up in ribbons & eventually washes ashore as tarballs.

        Speaking of evaporation, I’m disappointed that there hasn’t been more discussion of the video showing “oil rain” in River Ridge. I guarantee that the gutters in this neighborhood have a sheen after *every* heavy rain, and that it has a lot more to do with the leaking gasket in that guy’s ’78 El Camino than it does with BP’s well.

    • renny

      You also have to remember, as terrible as the leak (not a spill) is, we have only experienced two horrific incidents in many, many decades of drilling. Most errors and accidents are controlled and managed without disaster. Also, tankers leak and spill many thousands upon thousands of barrels of oil annually that we rarely even hear about.
      The worse problem hereb is the little o push to take over the industry by fiat, like the moratorium.
      Find candidates, work for them. send them money, give them times, reorient Congress so the executive cannot run roughshod over the Constitution and the law.

    • acat

      Back in 1979, the Ixtoc I oil well suffered catastrophic failure. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ixtoc (yeah, it’s Wiki, so Vladimir is a far more trusted source) :-) )

      Ixtoc was operated by Pemex in Mexican waters.

      In a similar fashion, but for different reasons, the BOP on Ixtoc also failed, releasing 30,000 gallons per day into the gulf. Note that Pemex tried both the “top kill” and “junk shot” approaches as well, with limited success.

      It took Pemex, who operated Ixtoc, ten months to get the first of two relief wells drilled. (compare to 4 months for BP)

      Note also that Pemex paid one hundred million dollars in cleanup, and hid behind sovereign immunity (Pemex is part of the Mexican government) to prevent paying more.

      Educational, to say the least.

      Mew

  • http://www.examiner.com/x-1597-Charlotte-Law--Politics-Examiner Mike gamecock DeVine

    Does the fact that only a few beaches so far have been despoiled indicate that Obama really dropped the ball when he didn’t coordinate a mass prevention plan early on, which plan might have prevented even the limited surfacing we have seen?

  • hungarianfalcon

    Dilution is the solution…

    HF

  • ss396

    I have fun asking people “if the 127 million gallons spilled were all pushed and constrained and piled up into a single square mile, how deep would it be?” ‘A hundred feet…?’ is a common guess. You can well imagine their surprise to learn that it would be a little over 7 inches deep.

    Not to belittle the damage, the continuing threat, and being cognizant that it continues to spew but, yes, let’s keep it in perspective.

    • eastbaylarry

      You might then go on to mention how many square miles contain any oil at all at this point.

      • http://www.examiner.com/x-1597-Charlotte-Law--Politics-Examiner Mike gamecock DeVine
      • ss396

        And you wind up talking about something that is about 1/10 of the thickness of a human hair.

        Another one is for those plumes that scientists kinda sorta find. Not surprising that they have trouble with them, as they are dealing with an oil density roughly equivalent to dropping 2 teaspoons of oil into a swimming pool, and mixing thoroughly. And then having to prove that it came from the Macondo well.

        A nice weekend glass of “Perspective” is always tasty. Cheers!

  • minncon

    Oil floats on water… so to really calculate the affected Gulf area, is it right to use “volume” measurements? Oil does not disperse evenly throughout a volume of water – it floats, and just doesn’t break down, does it?

    Wouldn’t the true measurement be: (CUBIC FEET SPILLED times DEPTH OF FLOATING OIL = AREA AFFECTED)?

    I believe that would be a more realistic way of looking at it. And, unfortunately, it gives a much greater damage area.

    • eastbaylarry

      is a mixture of all kinds of hydrocarbons. How many gallons of methane and/or natural gas is floating on the surface? Some components might ‘mix’ into a suspension in sea water.
      I would think that some other components would be close to the specific gravity of sea water and would ‘float’ only after an extended period below the surface.

      Perhaps Vladimir can shed some light on the expected composition of this ‘oil’?

    • cwilson

      If spread out over the entire gulf, the film would be 0.3 microns thick. That’s 0.1 millionths of an inch.

      Unfortunately, thanks to the EPA worries about dispersants being “harmful”, the oil is not…dispersing. ‘Cause THAT’s not harmful. Or something.

      • cwilson

        but I moved the decimal the wrong way when converting to inches. 0.3 um == 10 millionths of an inch.

  • Joliphant

    The releases of radioactive material were on a nearly completely undetectable level, FDA had to borrow equipment from the national institute of standards to actually detect radioactive strontium from the release.

    That data point, “Radioactive strontium” released got married to all the evils the element could cause with no mention that it was in nearly undetectable amounts.

  • http://vladenblog.tumblr.com Vladimir

    Yes, it’s the volume that matters, and, yes, oil spreads very thin on water.

    But…

    The volume of the Superdome is a fraction of the volume of a sphere of its diameter, and the volume of the spill is a fraction of *that*.

    The point being, I’ve seen articles in the mainstream press that have oil looping around Iceland. Impossible. It took a month for the oil to make it 50 miles to shore.

    And, yes, the lighter molecules in the crude oil mix do evaporate, leaving the heavies that make the tarballs behind.

    Relative to the size of the planet, it’s a pimple. It has made a mess. But it can’t ruin the planet. You can believe me or the guys on youtube.

  • http://truthupfront.blogspot.com jsanzone

    Vlad – good notes on the oil spill. Do you have thoughts on the carp dilemma up around Lake Michigan?

  • Tbone

    to make it worth waving if you are the enviro-nazi press.

  • kowalski

    That the entire quantity of mined gold in the world amounts to a cube much less than 50 meters on each side. You could place the entire quantity of known and reserved gold in the world in direct center of New York City and it would be smaller than a city block and only a couple of stories high, if that. It would be a neat-looking structure and maybe an obelisk, but from a satellite view it would barely register.

    Sometimes I think when New Yorkers have to wonder about rebuilding the WTC complex they’re paying a little more than the building is actually worth, but that’s not because of the intrinsic value of the reinforced concrete – it’s because of the lawsuits.

    It’s a very small quantity; there is much more gold in the ocean.

  • kowalski

    Because your volume estimate is approximately accurate. It’s a large spill in terms of people’s perceptions but volumetrically, compared to the Gulf, it’s not a relatively small quantity. The problem is that people don’t care about the math when they’re hiring lawyers to assess damages.

    To a lot of the people who are making claims, a drop is worth a million dollars.

  • Adjoran

    The ocean can deal with it, even if Obama refused to act on the early containment plan in place since 1994 (rumor has it he spent those first few days mainly in his Meditation and Worship Center with all the mirrors).

    The real problem will be if the relief wells don’t work, if the problem is not where we all believe it to be, but much deeper below the ocean floor. In that case, the only way to shut it off might be the “Soviet Solution” – a small nuclear blast to seal things up, which they did at least five times from 1966 – 1979, and possibly more. Of course, BP hates the idea because they only way they will recoup their costs is to harvest the oil there over time – nuke it and they still have the lost investment and damages to pay, but no oil to pay them with.

  • musiclady4

    This is an arrogant and dismissive view of the situation. This is not unlike saying in 1950, “You only have one little cancerous tumor, and it’s just a little thing in your pancreas. We’re trying to get to it, but we’ve got to just let it keep growing and see what happens in the meantime.” This oil is leaving massive carnage and destruction wherever any of its toxins go. The ramifications for the waters and all its living organisms are unprecedented, unfathomable and utterly destructive. I am not a liberal or an environmentalist; quite the opposite. However, the fact is that this oil is a death knell to millions of animals and organisms and a way of life for at least a million people. Go buy their businesses from them and walk in their shoes to wake yourself up.
    Good luck with this absurd, pompous and unscientific attitude, It is only a mathematical computation, not a scientific analysis or consideration . Has this site been infiltrated by the Left?

    • JSobieski

      Without math, any problem is the biggest problem ever in the history of the world since there is no way to measure. Putting things into context can be helpful in a variety of ways. It can also help keep you sane.

      Nobody is saying it isn’t a problem. They are saying that the earth and the Gulf of Mexico will survive.

      This is not an “unprecedented” disaster. The Mexican gusher in the 70s took something around 9 months to stop, and even longer to clearn up.

      Of course, that invovles math—length of time (measured by a number) and quantity of oil (again a measurement). So just go nuts about people talking about numbers and focus on feelings about the whole thing.

      Rest assured that the people who actually remedy this situation will be folks talking about numbers.

      • http://www.examiner.com/x-1597-Charlotte-Law--Politics-Examiner Mike gamecock DeVine

        is how essential is oil to modern life today and to the beginning of modern life on Planet Earth. Only since the application of oil after 5000 years of civilization, did living conditions drastically improve so that the poor today live better than kings of old.

      • jdw4america

        I know we’ve all been tutored that the scientific method is the assessment of the truth, but it’s not. It’s based on supposition and probabilities, not on absolutes. The mathematical certitude implied in data analysis is simply not there, so that the outcome can be interpreted or reported in numerous ways. Mathematical outcomes are what they are, objectively.

        That being said, while it is true that the impact on people’s lives and their livelihoods have and will continue to suffer, we must nevertheless keep an eye on the two most important issues.

        1) This is not a threat to the continued existence of all human life on the planet. Economically disastrous for the gulf region, yes, but the world is not coming to an end, despite the MSM’s spin.
        2) barry and friends have yet to respond to the problem. Even his go- to strategy, mainly talk until people fall asleep again, has failed to win friends and influence people. Why? because he and his comrades don’t care about the economy, unless they are actively involved in destroying it. The left in Washington are hoping they can spin this into cap and trade, and who knows what else they can get from the “rape of the natural world.”

        As we all know, if the feds had not impeded the process, we would have more resources working in the gulf right now. And as sorry as we may be for the people who live there, we cannot afford to allow the left to exploit them and manipulate any of us into surrendering any more liberty has already been stolen. Otherwise, when the gulf does recover, and it will, these same people might be required to pass a loyalty test in order to return to their way of life.

        Don’t think so? Unthinkable? So was the federal takeover of banks, car companies and healthcare. At least before 2008.

    • qurys

      Most of them are caused by humans and they leave carnage and destruction and toxins. Habitats are destoyed. Living creatures burn to death. I have watched this several times and I have seen the earth reborn. It does not take away the destruction, but the earth does seem to have a way of rejuvenating itself. I despise wildfires, but they barely make the news anymore. Our environmental policies will never totally protect the environment. Instead, they have made the risk that much greater. Our forests are overgrown tinderboxes and we have forced corporations to drill at 5000 feet.

      • Achance

        Hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions of acres burn every year in Alaska, the Yukon, and BC, almost none of which are caused by man. The same is true in Siberia. I’d like to see some good research done on the corelation between bad fire years and high-altitude and Arctic ice melt; if you want to melt snow and ice, make it dirty and even with the cold temperatures and low sun angles of the Arctic, the Sun will melt dirty ice and snow.