Do you think you have a solution to the oil spill?

[Raybo]

A giant inverted funnel (shaped more like a top hat apparently, but the idea is the same) is essentially what they have tried twice, but they have now gone to a smaller "cap" funnel thing attached over the well right now, attempting to catch escaping oil. But it's still basically the same idea, an extremely complicated and (hopefully) well-engineered funnel.

But more examples of the extreme environment: this new "funnel" oil-catcher works better than the first two they tried because they essentially pump anti-freeze into it to keep the methane from freezing solid into methane hydrate. Methane, a gas up here where we are, forms a SOLID with water down there, and that solid floats in water. The solid methane hydrate floated up, clogging the funnel, and actually making it buoyant, picking it up off the sea floor and allowing oil to escape from underneath in addition to clogging the tube. Their new design alleviates a lot of this, hopefully, and is amazingly complicated to try and make it actually work. It's been in place a couple of days now, we should know soon how well it is working.

Another crazy problem: the gases they collect down there expand as they come up due to pressure changes. The gases on their way up expand to 140 times original volume. This produces extreme adiabatic cooling, as well as REALLY screwing with the pressures and velocities of the stuff coming up the pipes. The engineers doing all this are 100% used to it and know exactly how to handle it, while Average Joe probably can't even spell adiabatic cooling.

Average Joe here! :wave:
But I do understand the pressure thingy, heck, engineer schmengineer! :na:

 

[bobhaha]

Probably a stupid idea... but why don't they bring in an oil rig... and pump out of the same hole? I mean its all set up and ready to go....

 

[TTerbo]

wouldnt welding near that oil idk ignite??

 

[bobhaha]

wouldnt welding near that oil idk ignite??

Underwater??

 

[Pontiacg5]

underwater welding - Google Search

You can weld underwater, I don't know that crude would ignite underwater though...

 

[bobhaha]

I know you can weld underwater... I meant the oil igniting underwater..

 

[daguin]

I cannot "explain" it. I only hope to help the layperson understand the problem.

Under extreme pressures materials do NOT act as we know them to. The physical properties are sometimes extremely different. In my limited study of gem formation I have come to understand that I do not have the background to actually understand the processes. However, perhaps this example will help us to understand that "common sense" ideas, have almost no value in extreme pressure (and/or heat) conditions like they are dealing with in the gulf

Under extreme pressure, SOLID ROCK can become "plastic" and actually "flow" along convection currents. It has NOT become "fluid" in the normal sense by "melting" from the temperature. Solid rock flows.

If you try to apply any of our brain's "common sense" to that situation, it fails completely.

You have to start understanding concepts like "undercooling" and being able to accept that the liquidus/solidous barrier forms a curve rather than a straight line. Those concepts do not exist in "common sense."

Trying to apply "common sense" to the situation in the gulf is equally incomprehensible.

Peace,
dave

 

[diachi]

Fire a missile down the hole which explodes and fills the hole full of that self expanding foam ...

I know, wouldn't work ...

 

[charliebruce]

Foam at 2 miles below the sea. Technical flaws of foam, physics and human survival aside, that would be fun to sit on top of, as it rockets to the surface at incredible speed

 

[daguin]

Fire a missile down the hole which explodes and fills the hole full of that self expanding foam ...

I know, wouldn't work ...

. . .but it would be fun to watch

Peace,
dave

 

[diachi]

. . .but it would be fun to watch

Peace,
dave

That *is* what I was thinking.

On a serious note, some scientists have suggested firing a small nuke down there ...

 

[Pontiacg5]

On a serious note, some scientists have suggested firing a small nuke down there ...

Lol if it didn't work

Nuclear crude oil pollution

 

[pullbangdead]

You have to start understanding concepts like "undercooling" and being able to accept that the liquidus/solidous barrier forms a curve rather than a straight line. Those concepts do not exist in "common sense."

You get the even better applause gif...the dude on the bottom right is actually wearing a monocle!

And wow does that take me back to undergrad, where I had more than a semester on phase transformations alone. You think undercooling itself is weird to wrap your head around? Try throwing constitutional supercooling into, that one's a doosy, at least for me. Undercooling makes some sense to me, since it's basically that you have to overcome surface energy before it will solidify, but constitutional supercooling took me a little while to really "get it".