It has now been nearly a month after the April 20th Deepwater Horizon disaster that has resulted in the largest oil spill in history and the “Gusher in the Gulf” continues unabated. I decided I was tired of the lies I that have been feed to me by the MSM and have put a pencil to paper to figure out how big this oil spill really is. Get ready, this is pretty scary stuff.
I started with the premise that the underwater spill is likely the most telling of the size of this disaster. Most experts agree that the underwater plume is now 10 miles long and 300 feet deep. Width estimates of the spill vary. NPR estimates the width at its thickest to be four to five miles wide. “What I can tell you is what we know about their size and their extent. It looks like they are, at the most, four or five miles wide, and they are roughly 10 or 15 miles long.”
We know that the spill is not in a straight line and it does taper end to end. So I took a conservative estimate of saying the underwater spill is ribbon in shape and averages the same in width as it does in depth, 300 feet. It takes 7.48051945 US gallons to make a cubic foot and there are approximately 42 gallons of crude oil to a barrel. One mile is 5,280 feet. My formula then is:
10 miles X 5,280 feet X 300 feet deep X 300 feet wide. This equals a whopping 4,752,000,000 cubic feet. Yes, that is 4.752 billion cubic feet.
At 7.48 gallons per cubic foot, that puts the spill today at 35,547,428,426 gallons. That is 35.5 billion gallons or 846 million barrels of oil!
Compare that to the measly 10.8 million gallons or 250,000 barrels of oil from the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989 and you get a picture of how bad this disaster really is, with no end in sight.
This spill is expected to get into the “Loop Current” leading to the Gulf Stream any day now if it hasn’t already done so. “This Loop Current has generally been sitting about 100 miles south of the site of the crippled Deepwater Horizon oil rig, where thousands of gallons of oil are gushing daily into the Gulf of Mexico. But that could change at any time. ‘Just how far to the north it extends varies,’ according to oceanographer Robert Weisberg of the University of South Florida, who studies ocean water circulation. ‘Sometimes it makes it as far as the wellhead.’” www.onearth.org
People are worried about this up the east coast of the US as far as Maine. “That’s a lot of oil in the sub-surface, and the concern is that it might have a better chance of getting into the Gulf of Maine. We don’t have much experience with that.” www.bangordailynews.com
“Officials from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) told reporters Tuesday that the so-called loop current, a fast-moving underwater current from the Caribbean has the potential to pick up oil from the south end of the slick and rotate it into the direction of the western coast of Florida, where it will be picked up by the Gulf Stream and taken in the direction of the Atlantic Ocean.” www.csmonitor.com
So the bottom line is this. We have been lied to about the size of the spill from BP, the US Government and the MSM who I am sure have calculators that work just as well as mine does. 35.5 billion gallons of oil is a pretty big mistake to hide, but it is underwater so it is not easily seen. We just get pictures of the spill from the surface. Crude oil kills just about any life that comes into contact with it and it is heading for the Atlantic as sure as freight train on track.
“As the presentation seems to show, this theory predicted that the released oil/gas might not immediately rise to the surface but would instead become trapped, at least temporarily in large plumes below the ocean surface level, suspended at a ‘neutral buoyancy point’ defined by the oil/gas characteristics, the pressure and temperature and the rate at which it became associated with sea water. The expected plume would drift with the current, but small droplets would gradually break off and rise to the surface where it would be observed there.” seminal.firedoglake.com
For what it is worth, 846 million barrels of oil divided by 30 days is an average of 28 million barrels per day of oil is gushing from those three open tubes at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. I am so tired of being lied to.
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