How much oil was that?

5 years ago, in 2010, the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico exploded when a pulse of high-pressure methane gas from the 1500m deep Macondo wellhead expanded into the drilling riser and rose into the drilling rig. The resulting oil spill was the largest accidental marine oil spill in history.

The quantity of oil released — 4.9 million barrels (206 million gallons)¹ — is difficult to grasp. To try to wrap my head around what that volume of oil looks like, I first represented it as an oil storage tank roughly 27m (85ft) in diameter like these…

View of Chevron crude oil depot, Richmond CA. Josh Cassidy/KQED. (Appologies to Chevron --- The Gulf spill was BP's accident. Chevron's tanks are only used in this article to show scale.)

…but 1500m high (nearly a mile). That’s the depth of the wellhead. There is no oil tanker in existence that could contain all that oil, though the now scrapped super tanker “Seawise Giant” could have held most of it.

Of course, the spill didn’t look like that. About half of the oil spread accross the surface as a slick, and half spread out in a deepwater plume², never reaching the surface but impacting the water column and ocean bottom. However, an intuitive feel for the quantities can us help to begin to understand the impact of the spill.

Natural oil and gas seeps in the Gulf

The Gulf of Mexico is well known as an oil reservoir, and like other ocean oil reservoirs, the Gulf features thousands of naturally occuring seeps that release small quanitites of oil and gas into the ocean on a continual basis. One might think that since the Gulf ecosystem has evolved to cope with these natural hydrocarbon releases, the impact of oil spills would be small (or at least reduced). But to understand the relationship between natural and accidental hydrocarbon releases in the Gulf, we need to begin by inderstanding the differences in scale.

A very active natural oil seep in the Gulf of Mexico can put out around 1 barrel of oil per day and looks like this:

Natural oil seep in the Gulf of Mexico. Photo ECOGIG

There are something like 20,000 seeps in the Gulf but most put out much less that one barrel per day. The total daily output of all the seeps in the Gulf is not well constrained, but a “reasonable” estimate based on extrapolation from looking at small areas would be from 2500 to 10,000 barrels per day.³⁴

One day's output from all 20,000 natural oil seeps in the entire Gulf of Mexico (2500 to 10,000 barrels) would fill a hypothetical tank 19.6m (64 ft) high and 5 to 10 meters (16 to 32 ft) in diameter. *The large tanks in the background hold 750,000 barrels and would comfortably fit a 747 inside.

By contrast, the Macondo wellhead spilled from 57,000 to 70,000 barrels per day from a single point source. It would take from 1 to 4 weeks for the output of all the natural seeps in the gulf to equal one day’s output from the macondo wellhead.

One day's output from the Macondo wellhead blowout would have filled a hypothetical tank the same height (19.6m or 64 ft) but 24 to 27 meters (80 to 88 ft) in diameter.

1 day’s output would fill a giant 88m diameter storage tank in 11-13 days. The wellhead discharged oil continually for 86 days, outputting 4.9 Million Barrels. It would take all the storage tanks in the field below to contain that oil:

Section of the Chevron Richmond Refinery. These tanks are used to store crude oil offloaded from oil tankers. the tanks on the right are the ersatz 747 hangars.

Or, one might construct a single storage tank 6 stories tall and nearly 2 1/2 football fields in diameter.

This hypothetical storage tank, too large to ever be built, is 19.6m high and 225m in diameter.

To sum up the comparison of natural vs. accidental oil releases in the Gulf of Mexico, let’s look at those quantities side by side.

You can read more about the Deepwater Horizon spill and its effects on the Gulf ecosystem at ecogig.org.

If you’d like to explore the visualizations in this article yourself in Google Earth, download the KMZ files below. Double click on the .kmz files and they will open in Google Earth.

seeps.kmz
macondo-daily.kmz
macondo-widetank.kmz

Stepping down as curator of SLINGSHOT to join ECOGIG

It’s after a not a small amount of reflection that I’ve decided to step down as Curator of the SLINGSHOT Festival of Music, Electronic Arts and Technology, in order to focus on data visualization research with ECOGIG, a research consortium studying the impact of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

In 2012, Kai Riedl approached me with an idea for a new festival in Athens, Georgia to promote forward thinking music and art. The festival would be called Slingshot. Together, and with support from the Athens community and the University of Georgia (UGA), we put together the first SLINGSHOT Festival of Music, Electronic Arts and Technology in March 2013. Edition 1 of SLINGSHOT featured national and local pop music alongside some of the best international sound art and visual art, all with a focus on technology. SLINGSHOT’s major innovation was to create a continuum across popular, experimental, and serious art forms.

Over the next 2 years, we grew SLINGSHOT into a fully fledged festival and conference with an international profile; one which has begun to have a positive impact on education and economic development in our community as it celebrates creativity. As curator, I built the Art and Tech sections of the festival, with participation of the Georgia Museum of Art, Lamar Dodd School of Art, UGA’s College of Engineering, and support from the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts and the Office of the Vice President for Research. SLINGSHOT II and III featured high profile international sound artists, electronic music composers and visual artists, tech talks and demonstrations on arts technology, culminating in 2015 with the Sensory Overload conference, featuring top researchers in big data, data visualization and data sonification. In 2015 we also launched our educational outreach initiative, GIZMO, which offers unique instruction in music, art and technology to kids in Athens.

The path to Marine Sciences

As many reading this know, I am a composer and sound artist. Marine Sciences may seem an unlikely move. My training was in composition and computer music, initially at the University of Montreal and McGill University, then at CNMAT (the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies) at the University of California, Berkeley. Since 2004, I’ve been teaching sound art, interactive art and graphic design at the University of Georgia.

What most probably don’t know is that I once considered studying oceanography, having grown up in San Francisco with a deep attachment to the water. And working at the Exploratorium as a high school student in the 1980′s gave me the bug for science, which I’ve carried with me through all my artistic endeavors ever since. For the past few years, I have been working in “data perceptualization,” that is, multi-sensory data representation combining mainly visualization and sonification. I put together a faculty research cluster on the topic, bringing together designers and scientists to work on real problems involving data representation and communication.

When Samantha Joye, director of ECOGIG, offered me the opportunity to join the team as a data visualization researcher, I saw a unique chance to combine my interests and redirect my expertise and creativity towards a greater good.

We in the arts are often conflicted over our contribution to society. We have the arguably selfish luxury of making a living through pure, purposeless expression. I have always been one of those who have argued that art is a fundamental and necessary component of a functioning society, and has intrinsic value to humanity. Nevertheless, we who share that belief are not immune to the desire to make a more tangible contribution. Art can make that tangible contribution through what it has to teach science about communication and even discovery. (That was my motivation in bringing together scientists and artists for the Sensory Overload conference.)

But now, I have the chance to make an even more direct contribution to science with ECOGIG. I am deeply grateful for that. Though I will miss working with Slingshot, I can’t easily express how excited I am to work with ECOGIG’s team of top marine scientists helping to shape the future of our oceans.

-Éric Marty | @allopole