{"id":16389,"date":"2010-06-28T08:14:09","date_gmt":"2010-06-28T12:14:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=16389"},"modified":"2012-02-29T14:49:18","modified_gmt":"2012-02-29T19:49:18","slug":"clas-blog-slick-calculations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2010\/06\/clas-blog-slick-calculations\/","title":{"rendered":"Slick Calculations"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"<p>Dean<\/a>
Dean Jeremy Teitelbaum speaking during the CLAS Commencement in May 2010. Photo by Peter Morenus<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Playing by the numbers in an effort to comprehend the Gulf oil spill.<\/h3>\n

By Jeremy Teitelbaum, Dean<\/a>
\nCollege of Liberal Arts and Sciences<\/a><\/p>\n

On a hill overlooking the UConn campus stand three big blue water towers<\/a>. For a long time I never noticed them \u2013 they\u2019re the kind of landscape feature that the eye tends to edit out \u2013 but recently they were discussed at a meeting of the University\u2019s Buildings and Grounds Committee, on which I serve.<\/p>\n

Two of the three towers, holding together about a million gallons of water, are old and need to be replaced<\/a>, and it was our job to approve the spending of $2.5 million to do that work. (If you\u2019re going to store a million gallons of water on a hill above campus, it\u2019s a good idea to make sure that the tanks will not fail<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

The third, more modern tower holds a million gallons on its own.<\/p>\n

\"<p>CLAS<\/p>\n

The million-gallon figure struck me as particularly significant because the most recent estimate of the amount of oil spewing out of the damaged Deepwater Horizon well<\/a> on the floor of the Gulf of Mexico is 60,000 barrels per day. A barrel of oil is about 42 gallons, so 60,000 barrels is 2.5 million gallons. Every 10 hours or so, a million gallons of oil \u2013 enough to fill the biggest of the three blue tanks overlooking UConn\u2019s campus \u2013 pours into the Gulf of Mexico. Between the accident on April 20, 2010, and today, June 22, 64 days have elapsed, so something like 160 million gallons of oil have been released into the water. That\u2019s equivalent to 160 of those big blue tanks, with more oil coming every minute.<\/p>\n

Somehow, though, this isn\u2019t a very satisfying picture of the scope of the mess. The oil isn\u2019t neatly packaged in big blue tanks. As you can see from this image<\/a> generated by UConn\u2019s Department of Marine Sciences<\/a>, there\u2019s oil in a thin slick over a large stretch of ocean near the southern shore of the U.S.<\/p>\n

I found a nice graph at this site<\/a>, belonging to the Australian Maritime Safety Authority<\/a>, that explains a little bit about the thickness of oil on water. According to that graph, a slick half a micron thick is barely visible on water, while one 100 microns thick forms a gloppy \u201cmousse.\u201d<\/p>\n

To put those numbers in perspective, a piece of cheap copy paper is around 100 microns thick. So, to try to visualize a million-gallon slick that\u2019s 100 microns deep, imagine taking the biggest blue UConn water tower, filling it up with neatly stacked pieces of paper, and then laying that paper out over the surrounding landscape. My calculations<\/a> say that this amount of paper (or oil) forms a circle about 3.5 km, or about 2.2 miles, in radius.<\/p>\n

This means that if a one-million gallon slick were centered at our water towers<\/a>, it would stretch west to Eagleville Pond and north to Four Corners and beyond.<\/p>\n

If it were 1 micron thick instead of 100 microns thick, it would be much larger. In fact, it would be large enough to completely cover the 1,400 square miles of Long Island Sound.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a clich\u00e9 that humans aren\u2019t good at grasping large numbers. When I hear about a big number with some significance \u2013 the 60,000 barrels of oil a day \u2013 I make a point of turning that number around in my head in order to try to get some sort of comprehension of it. This visual calculation of the spill came out of such a mental exercise.<\/p>\n

Now if I can just make some sense of the $3 billion or so that represents the projected shortfall in Connecticut\u2019s state budget, or the $1.2 trillion that make up the federal deficit, I will really be making some progress.<\/p>\n

The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences has 23 departments in the sciences, humanities, and social sciences, ranging from physics to philosophy, and more than 15,000 students, 600 faculty, and 83,000 alumni. Check out our three initiatives: Health and Human Behavior<\/a>, the Environment<\/a>, and Culture and Society<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Other CLAS Blog posts:<\/h4>\n

On Not Buying an iPad<\/a><\/p>\n

A Step Closer to Science Fiction?<\/a><\/p>\n

Academic Freedom Meets Freedom of Information<\/a><\/p>\n

Ambition and Intrigue in the Court of Henry VIII<\/a><\/p>\n

A Civil Conversation on Contentious Issues<\/a><\/p>\n

Academically Anchored<\/a><\/p>\n

Meditations on A(nother) Snow Day<\/a><\/p>\n

Coming to Grips with Climate Change<\/a><\/p>\n

Ideas — The Psychological Currency of the University<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/a>‘Just Hire the Best’?<\/a><\/p>\n

Will ‘Crowdsourcing’ Revolutionize Scholarship?<\/a><\/p>\n

Hidden Symmetries<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/a>Spectacular Storrs<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/a>Citizenship, Marriage, and Mosques: Problems in the Applied Humanities<\/a><\/p>\n

Of Deans and English Professors<\/a><\/p>\n

The Joys of Jamming<\/a><\/p>\n

The Road to Agra<\/a><\/p>\n

UConn Over Yale and Other Tales from Jim Draper \u201941<\/a><\/p>\n

The Amazon, Avatar, and Smallpox<\/a><\/p>\n

The Value of Curiosity<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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