Imagine this: you’re at the keg (hard to imagine I know), when some fool carrying a pitcher of beer back to his table thinks he can make it across the dance floor without spilling any of it. For the sake of the analogy, let’s say this pitcher can hold about 1.6 million gallons of beer.
Of course, some guy who’s grinding on some girl somehow manages to shoulder check the pitcher and beer spills everywhere. Havoc ensues. People are drowning in endless gallons of cheap, flip-cupable beer, Blackberries and iPhones are getting lost way too easily, and worst of all, the grinding has stopped before 2 a.m. This is no ordinary Monday night.
Now imagine that those keg-goers are animals (fish and other adorable ocean-dwelling creatures), this bar is an ocean and that pitcher is an oil rig. Now you have the havoc in the Gulf of Mexico.
On April 20, off the coast of Louisiana, the oil rig “Deepwater Horizon” exploded and then sank, rupturing an undersea well. This rupture is churning out some 5,000 barrels (210,000 gallons) of crude oil per day. Depending on what car you have, that’s like filling up your tank 34,370 timesper day. WTF.
Stopping the rupture will be difficult and take some time, requiring the use of unmanned vessels to venture 5,000 feet under water to plug the leak. In the mean time, preparations are underway on land. As early as yesterday, the oil slick had reached barrier islands off the coast of Louisiana, threatening local wildlife. Though oil buoys have been placed along the coast to protect coastline habitats, wildlife protection officials are in preparation to use machines and even oil eating microbes (kick-ass) to clean up the imminent monstrosity of an oil spill.
On water, the coast guard is using skimmers (boats with giant rakes) and buoys to contain and clean up as much oil as possible.
Lame right?
Bad-ass ways to clean up the oil spill:
1.) GIANT SPONGES!
Actually not too ridiculous of a proposal. Once the oil is contained, you can drop sponges on it called sorbents, which absorb the oil.
2.) BIO-WARFARE!
Basically, we drop WMDs on oil. But benevolent WMDs. Planes fly over the oil spill and drop chemical dispersants: liquid solvents that break down the oil into droplets that are safe for the environment.
3.) FIRE!
That’s right. Burn it. It’s the easiest of these solutions and it gets rid of all the oil that’s flammable. So, all of it. However, the process (called in situ burning) releases a toxic smoke that probably doesn’t do much good for the environment. In sum, a counter-intuitive solution that would look bad-ass.
