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It’s a good thing for oil spill science that Richard Camilli was not yet on a flight to Australia when the Coast Guard called last May. An hour later and Camilli might have missed the urgent request to get a team together to measure the month-old leak from the Deepwater Horizon pipe. In a richly detailed and highly accessible talk, Camilli describes novel research he performed in the depths of the Gulf to quantify the disaster, helping to settle heated conflicts swirling around the oil gushing from BP’s broken well head. In addition to its vast scale, the spill posed other uniquely challenging conditions, says Camilli: the well’s depth of 5,000 feet required robotic tools for examination or intervention, and enormous undersea pressures encouraged the formation of hydrate crystals, as a mix of oil, gas and other chemicals shot out of the pipe at high temperature, and mixed with much cooler water. Through technological innovations, Camilli was able to measure the flow rate of this “multiphase fluid” as it spewed from the well. With specially rigged equipment, Camilli’s team “listened” to fluid velocity, and imaged the flow with sonar, putting both kinds of measurements together to arrive at the volumetric flow rate. Camilli calculated a daily flow rate for oil from the well, and then its total output, and came up with a net leak of 4.2 million barrels. He also learned that oil from this deep reservoir contained a large fraction of gas, an important finding in terms of environmental impact. While running this research, Camilli discovered a coherent “oil emulsion layer,” a subsurface plume, which he was able to investigate nearly immediately due to a fast turnaround government grant. This time, Camilli deployed a NASA-designed, free-swimming, autonomous undersea device (AUV), which runs a preprogrammed mission then “swims to the surface and waits to be picked up.” Using the AUV, Camilli tracked the plume “meandering along the continental shelf” at around 1,100 meter...
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Video Length: 0
Date Found: January 31, 2011
Date Produced: January 12, 2011
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MIT World |
July 07, 2011
In three presentations that look back to digital-age milestones, and glimpse ahead to what may come next, speakers share some previously undisclosed stories, great enthusiasms, and a few concerns. Nicholas Negroponte tells a few “dirty secrets” about the start of the MIT Media Lab, including ...
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MIT World |
June 29, 2011
Winners of the A.M.Turing Award, the Nobel Prize of computing, describe their singular contributions to the field, and their works’ impact. They also find time to discuss the current and future state of computer science. Moderator Stephen Ward starts with 1990 prize winner Fernando Corbato, who ...
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MIT World |
June 13, 2011
Drew Davidson likes to play with blocks in his sandbox, as he demonstrates in a show-and-tell to interactive media colleagues. In this case, the playground is an online game called Minecraft, a two-year-young internet sensation with millions of followers, developed single-handedly by a ...
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MIT World |
June 06, 2011
Amy Bruckman finds the accomplishments of such online collaborations as Wikipedia, Apache and Firefox “nothing less than astounding,” and is both eagerly seeking and hoping to foster the next creative group Internet sensation. In her lab’s empirical studies, Bruckman has dissected different ...
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MIT World |
June 06, 2011
The ultimate questions for this Sandbox 2011 panel, posed by moderator Alan Gershenfeld, are “Where is technology not working? When is technology not the answer?” That’s a bold agenda for a panel of children’s media creators and a roomful of other producers in the industry, from Sesame ...
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