Scientists build new atlas of ocean’s oxygen-starved waters • Hacker News Board

Re: Scientists build new atlas of ocean’s oxygen-starved waters

#21

Post by marginalia_nu » Tue, Dec 28, 2021, 4:52 PM UTC

nisegami wrote: post #20

doodlebugging wrote: post #17

> measures about 600,000 cubic kilometers — roughly the volume of water that would fill 240 billion Olympic-sized pools. The second zone, off the coast of Central America, is roughly three times larger. You see this a lot with anything involving a description of a volume of liquid. It inevitably ends up using an Olympic-sized swimming pool as a yardstick for the laymen. To me, especially in this case involving hundre…

I want to imagine that lakes might be a good starting point for this comparison. For example, 600,000 km^3 is roughly 50 Lake Superiors. This is still context dependent, but I can at least pull up a map and look at the size of Lake Superior to get a feel for it.

Lakes have a sort of nebulous depth though. They're probably a better measuring stick for area than volume.

Re: Scientists build new atlas of ocean’s oxygen-starved waters

#22

Post by pirate787 » Tue, Dec 28, 2021, 5:18 PM UTC

HPsquared wrote: post #18

doodlebugging wrote: post #17

> measures about 600,000 cubic kilometers — roughly the volume of water that would fill 240 billion Olympic-sized pools. The second zone, off the coast of Central America, is roughly three times larger. You see this a lot with anything involving a description of a volume of liquid. It inevitably ends up using an Olympic-sized swimming pool as a yardstick for the laymen. To me, especially in this case involving hundre…

I think this principle should apply to any big business or government spending etc: how much is it per person? There's a lot of talk of billions and trillions at the federal level, and millions or billions at more local level. Far more relevant to say how much it costs per person.

Per taxpayer is even more precise.

Re: Scientists build new atlas of ocean’s oxygen-starved waters

#23

Post by acegopher » Tue, Dec 28, 2021, 10:57 PM UTC

doodlebugging wrote: post #17

> measures about 600,000 cubic kilometers — roughly the volume of water that would fill 240 billion Olympic-sized pools. The second zone, off the coast of Central America, is roughly three times larger. You see this a lot with anything involving a description of a volume of liquid. It inevitably ends up using an Olympic-sized swimming pool as a yardstick for the laymen. To me, especially in this case involving hundre…

An Olympic swimming pool is 50m x 25m at a depth of 2m, so an area of 1250 square meters. The continental US is 8,080,464,252,719 square meters, so it would take 6,464,371,402 Olympic swimming pools to cover the continental US. Stacking Olympic swimming pools in layers it would take about 37 layers swimming pools to cover the US with 240 billion Olympic-sized swimming pools.

So the volume of water is enough to cover the continental US with water to a depth of 75 meters if I did my math correct. And that second zone, three times larger, could cover the Continental US to a depth of 225 meters.