Does anyone know about how much area an oil slick from a supertanker would be.?

Question

This is a homework question and i have been looking on different sites and cannot find the area and though while i looked i would post the question.

About how much of an area would the oil slick from a supertanker be?

All i need to know is an aproximation of what would happen if A FULL SUPERTANKER WAS TO SPILL EVERY DROP IN THE OCEAN. IF SO WHAT WOULD THE AREA OF THE SPILL BE IN APROXIMATION. I dont need to know anything else and not how well its protected or something

I am not in colledge and all i need to know is if one supertanker ,which i have just figured out hold about 10 million gallons of oil depending on other things, was to spill all of its oil what the size of the spill would be.

Answer 1

Steven,

You need to be more specific AND use spell check!!!!

STRIKE!!!!

(-:

Answer 2

Well, some supertankers can hold a million tonnes of oil. If you place a drop of oil on water it can spread out to form a monolayer 1 molecule thick; say 10^-8 metre. The area of the world's oceans is about 300 million sq.km., so if you do the sums, in principle the contents of a supertanker could completely cover the world's oceans. This wouldn't happen in practice for all sorts of reasons though.

Answer 3

Your question is not specific enough. What type of oil is the ship carrying? How much oil is it carrying? What types of oil-spill safeguards does it use and how effective are they, normally? Where is the ship (what ocean, river, bay, etc)? Which way is the ship going and which way is the tide going? What are the conditions: Is the ship near an island? Has there been an earlier oil-slick? EVERY ship creates a certain amount of oil-slick, just from oil leaking out of its engines. This type of slick does not spread very far and is dissipated quickly.

But, if it is a super-tanker and if it is full of crude oil (hundreds of millions of gallons) and spills every drop of it in the middle of the ocean, the slick would spread to an area of thousands of square miles and would last for several years. If you look up the Exxon Valdez spill in Prince William Sound, you will get a rough idea.