Because these are the questions that keep us up at night. Photo: Shutterstuck
David Aldridge is a marine biologist and author who penned the book Do Fish Sleep? The point of the book was to answer some basic yet not widely understood “mysteries” about our oceans (Yes, do fish sleep is one of the actual questions he digs into). Apparently he didn’t stop at figuring out whether or not the Bermuda Triangle is real and decided to teach us all a lesson in just how vast our oceans are by asking how long it would take to drain them in a post published on Deep Sea News. And yes, this is all just through one bathroom plug at the bottom of the ocean.
Imagining the ocean was a perfectly symmetrical bowl without all its complex topography under the surface, Aldridge simplified his experiment by giving it just two variables. First, how much water is in the ocean and second, what’s the rate at which the water would flow through the hole? He also pointed out that a math wiz would have to calculate the variable rates of flow thanks to all the pressure that would push water down once the plug is pulled, then account for the reduced pressure as the ocean emptied. For the sake of going along with it all I guess the guy just assumed one would balance out the other, or like myself he really didn’t see any point in doing complex math stuff. So let’s just Algebra 1 the hell out of this.
Aldridge’s complex experiment consisted of filling and emptying his bathroom sink (hooray for droughts), which he discovered drains approximately 30 liters of water per minute. Assuming the drain in the bottom of the ocean has the same amount of hair stuck in it as Aldridge’s, we’re obviously on pace for a pretty accurate and awesome answer. So this particular sink drains 43,200 liters per day, which comes out to about 15 million liters per year. With a total volume of water throughout the ocean of 1.3 billion cubic kilometers that would give us a grand total of more than 80 trillion years to drain the entire ocean through said bathroom plug. “Or, to put it another way, almost 6,000 times longer than the entire universe has been in existence,” as Aldridge says.
So in any case, here’s another reminder that you are just one teeny tiny fraction of a blip in this tremendously large universe.
