Football Fields of Spilled Oil

May 13, 2010 – 11:54 am

It's been a long time since I posted, but I got an idea the other day and my mind wouldn't let it go until I did the math. With 200,000 gallons of oil per day spilling into the Gulf of Mexico from the BP oil rig explosion, how could I envision that amount in a number I could grasp?

Well, luckily, gallons are just units of volume and easily converted into areas. And an area most Americans are familiar with is a football field. From goal line to goal line, sideline to sideline, a football field is 300 feet by 160 feet. To standardize everything into metric measurements, that's 91.44 by 48.768 meters, or 4459.345 square meters.

Now, a liter is just 1,000 cubic centimeters and the area of a meter is 10,000 square centimeters. So to fill a square meter area one centimeter deep would require 10,000 cubic centimeters of material, or ten liters.

When we convert 200,000 gallons into liters, we get 757082.356 liters, and we would need 44593.45 liters to cover the footmall field 1 centimeter deep. When we divide 757082.356 by 44593.45, we get a depth of 16.977 centimeters, or 6.68 inches.

So, the amount of oil being spilled into the Gulf of Mexico is enough to cover an American football field 6 2/3 inches deep, or 6 2/3 football fields an inch deep, or enough to create a millimeter thick oil slick the size of almost 170 football fields... every day.