Peenie Wallie

During the BP Oil Spill,, like everyone else, I sat there and panicked and watched them down on the beaches in rubber suits acting like morons. But now that the spill is over. Now that it's been contained, I think it makes sense to look back at it and try to assess how bad it really was.

According to estimates, approximately 4.9 million (4,900,000) gallons of oil spilled into the Gulf of Mexico. Or, to put it in terms of something easier to comprehend, enough oil spilled to fill approximately 7.5 olympic-sized pools.

Now - the volume of the Gulf of Mexico is estimated at 2,434,000 cubic kilometers of water.

One cubic kilometer of water = 264,172,052,358.15 U.S. Imperial (liquid) gallons.

So 2,434,000 cubic kilometers of water = 6.43 * 10^17 gallons of water. This can also be expressed as 642,994,775,439,730,000 gallons of water, or roughly 643 quadrillion gallons of water.

If we divide the number of gallons of water in the gulf of mexico by the number of gallons of water that can fit into an olmypic-sized pool (660,253 gallons per pool), we get 973,861,194,784 (nine hundred seventy three billion) olympic pools of water in the Gulf of Mexico. So, rounding up slightly, a good approximation would be that there are roughly a trillion olympic sized pools of sea water in the Gulf of Mexico.

And, into that...into a body of water that holds roughly a trillion olympic sized pools of seawater, BP spilled 7.5 olympic-sized pools of oil. Bet you didn't know that, did 'ya? ;)

Update: Mitch pointed out that there were 4.9 million barrels of oil spilled (not 4. 9 million gallons), as I indicated. So, he's right, no doubt. My mistake was that I looked at this site first, which said 5,000,000 gallons of oil had spilled. However, this was posted during the oil spill, not after the well was capped. So, this was an initial, low estimate. Then, when I saw the 4.9 million number in Wikipedia, I read it as gallons instead of barrels. My mistake.

So, if there's 42 U S Imperial liquid gallons of oil in a barrel, then it changes my math a bit. It means that, instead of the "7.5 olympic swimming pools" of oil spilled, when all was said-and-done, there were closer to 315 olympic-sized swimming pools of oil spilled into the gulf, which holds a trillion gallons of sea-water.

A trillion is a big number, and it's hard to wrap your head around. To help understand how big a trillion is, consider this:

"1 million seconds is about 11.5 days, 1 billion seconds is about 32 years while a trillion seconds is equal to 32,000 years".

So, into a salt-water bay that holds a trillion olympic-sized pools of sea-water, BP spilled 315 olympic-sized pools of oil. This is nothing. It's trivial. It may have killed some turtles or dolphins, but that is hardly anything out of the ordinary. Dolphins and turtles die all of the time. And oil naturally leaks into the ocean from cracks in the ocean floor every single day, and has since there was oil and water on the earth. They just don't take their stupid cameras out there to film it and put it on CNN because there's no one to sue or blame for the problem.

To me, an oil spill is sort of like complaining about littering on the highway. It's unsightly, but it really doesn't materially change much. If someone wants to throw an empty McDonald's bag on the side of the road, it's unsightly, and not something I would personally do, but it also doesn't have any real adverse impact on the ecosystem as a whole. Like, road-side trash (litter) is not pleasant to look at, but it's not like it's killing off the elk or the deer or the black bears. Now, the garbage floating in the pacific is a horse of a different color, but I digress.)

My point being that, in hindsight, although the oil spill wasn't something planned, expected, or appreciated, it's not the end of the world as we know it, either.