Pass It On

Oooh man, still no word from BP other than "going as planned." I did however watch CNN bash Obama and BP for quite some time yesterday, and happened to see a guest scientist on the show who was trying to explain how this top kill mud pile thing works, and why it's not actually terrifying that they stopped pouring mud for a bit (in a sentence or two). It flew right over the host's head, but I'm pretty sure I got the gist of what he was attempting to explain. The basic idea is that the mud is getting shot down the pipe to overpower the pressure of the oil in hopes that the hydrostatic forces of the mud and oil will reach equilibrium... buh? Yea, that's actually more words than he used, and if you're like Campbell Brown you're asking, "so why doesn't the oil just come flying out again once you stop pouring mud?"

Sciency Junk! :D If I'm not mistaken, this system loosely resembles the fundamentals of the hydraulic press in reverse. The weight of the ocean and ocean floor is pushing down on a reservoir of oil which has a very narrow escape route. The pressure at that route is not that great in comparison to the weight of the ocean floor, but still immense as we've seen. If the ocean floor SINKS say an inch, then the oil in the pipe must RISE by that same inch multiplied by the ratio of the surface area of the oil reservoir divided by the surface area of the hole in the pipe. HUGE multiplier. The distance the oil has risen is multiplied by the cross sectional area of the pipe, which equates to a MASSIVE volume of oil! And if I'm not mistaken the velocity has the same scaling factor.

If you can start to push that stack of oil back down, it works like a hydraulic press where it requires less force over a greater distance to push the larger mass a small distance. Due to the narrowness of the tube, it's conceivable that the force needed can be provided by just the mass of the mud pile in the pipe. If that mud pile gets large enough, then the system will reach equilibrium. They pumped for HOURS before taking a break, so there's a lot of mud the oil must fight to come back out. This means it won't come flying out all at once, but will slowly accelerate because the pressure of the oil remains the same, but as more mud comes out less mass is being used to force the oil down. Interesting o.o

I would assume they paused to take a measurement to estimate how much further they need to push the oil down, and also to refill on mud. If the length of the pipe is shorter than the calculated required length of mud, then they may as well try something else. But so far everything is "going as planned."


Unrelated Tax Junk: Check out this article by Derek Thompson. He had a great article on Hillary's comment about raising taxes. Good perspective and intelligent comments too! I weighed in on a few of them, and you should too!... but Dad, try to keep it brief on other people's posts! Here's the link: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/05/hillary-clintons-unfortunate-defense-of-higher-taxes/57427/?success#toggleBio

Have a good weekend!
~Yasu