No that's just a sliding scale - the deeper the water the greater the pressure - the material factors in my experiments, your experiment and the BP operation are all the same except that mine managed to replicate what's actually happening whereas, for some reason, yours didn't.

km

The reason mine doesn't replicate the situation in the gulf (as much as any kitchen table-top experiment can ;-) is that the oil isn't under any pressure other than that of the equalized air inside the flask. In the gulf, the oil is under tremendous unequalized pressure that's not represented in my experiment.

The only functional difference I can find between my experiment set-up and yours appears to be the use of cellophane as a seal vs. a rubber stopper, which leads me to theorize that that must somehow be the factor leading to the different results ...

Well, when you immerse your container into water the oil is under the same type of pressure, but much less of it, as the oil in the Gulf subsea reservoir. Suppose instead of oil in your experiment you used a gas - what would happen to it after immersion?

km

No, immersing a closed, hard-sided vessel in water, does not make the inside pressure dependent on the depth of the water. If that were the case, submarines would be impossible.

I can't believe I'm responding to this :p

Uh, no.

The oil in the well is under pressure from rock and trapped gasses, not water. Or do you believe plastic wrap is somehow equivalent to 18,000 feet of rock?

You've obviously never heard of 'the bends' that divers suffer inside diving bells... submarines use ballast tanks to take in air or water to make the vessel rise or dive at will.

km

Hmmmn that's strange because when it escapes from the rock... it's still under pressure my God, this is like teaching the juniors.

km

Hey you better believe it...


I get the bends every time I read some of these threads !

The bends does not occur in self-contained, solid-sided vessels. It occurs when air pressure, in open-sided vessels, or in scuba gear, has to match the water pressure. So in "diving bells," the bottom of which are open, air pressure has to match water pressure to keep the water out of the bell. Breathing such highly pressurized air makes it possible for a greater amount of nitrogen gas to dissolve in the blood stream of people who breathe the air, and the bends is, quite literally, the bubbling out of that gas when the air pressure is reduced as the bell (or, in case of scuba divers the diver) comes up towards the surface and the water pressure, hence the air pressure, reduces. The fix is to put such divers into highly pressurized, solid-sided vessels on the surface, where the air pressure can be raised sufficiently to make the nitrogen re-dissolve into the blood, and then reduce the pressure very slowly. In short, the bends proves my point in two different ways.

edit: the wiki article is pretty clean on all this, by the way.

I don't know why you guys argue with this half-wit.

This is a topic that really hits home for me (as it were), so I've purposely avoided getting into these discussions. Because arguing with this fool would probably put me over the edge.