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"It's the same feeling you get when someone asks you how many jelly beans are in a jar," Chiang said. "I'm confident enough in it to say it is well above 5,000 barrels a day"
-- equal to more than 210,000 gallons daily. Crone agreed the flow was almost certainly much higher than the government's estimate. "Whether it's twice, four times or 20 times I don't know," he said. To make their estimates, the scientists essentially tracked particles or billows of oil across the video screen, then used the size of the pipes, particles and speed of the video to come up with a rate. "It's an established method that's been around 25 years," said Carl Meinhart, an engineering professor at University of California Santa Barbara. Meinhart did not make a calculation of his own, but was contacted by The Associated Press to assess the researchers' methodology. Under controlled lab conditions, the results are accurate within a couple percentage points, but that's not the case here, he said. There are a lot of variables that can't be calculated because of the poor quality of the video and the lack of a sense of scale, he said. Just eyeballing the video for the first time, Meinhart said he would guess a margin of error of plus or minus 20 percent on estimates. One scientist who believes the government and BP have the right number is Paul Fischbeck at Carnegie Mellon, an engineering professor who also studies risk and regulation.
Just judging by the size of the slick -- about 3,500 square miles -- and the three weeks of the spill, 210,000 "looks about right as far as the slick goes," Fischbeck said. If the higher estimates were right, there would be a much bigger slick, he said. But some of the oil could be lingering under the water's surface. In previous cases, it's been as much as half of the spill, said University of California Berkeley engineering professor Bob Bea. The environmental impact will be vastly different depending on the size of the spill, some experts agreed. If the flow turns out to be closer to the higher end estimates, "that's a major catastrophe," Bea said. If it's closer to the government's estimate, it is something that can be handled. ___ On the Net National Academy of Sciences "Oil in the Sea" report summary:
http://books.nap.edu/html/oil_in_the_sea/
reportbrief.pdf
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