“That is roughly comparable to the amount of sugar in 32 billion cans of Coke!”
That's a unique unit of measure I've not seen before. I know in one of Gary Larson's old books he had a comment on his "skeletonize a cow in less than a minute" comic about how he loves weird units of measurement like this.
There's a meme that americans will use anything to avoid metric system. Typically with examples like "hole in the road with the size of 2 washing machines".
There's a great Simpsons joke where Grandpa says, "the metric system is the tool of the devil, my car gets 40 rods to the hog's head, and that's the way I like it!"
For those who are curious, 1 rod is 0.003125 miles. Thus, 40 rods is 0.125 miles. 1 hogshead is 1/63 of a US gallon.
Thus, 40 rods to the hog's head is 7.875 miles per gallon, 29.87 L/100km, or 3.348 km/L.
EDIT: sorry, 1 hogshead is 63 US gallons. This comes to about 0.002 miles per gallon... yikes! (divide all the numbers in the previous paragraph by 63^2)
From a quick search it seems both a normal gallon and a wine gallon are measured at 231 cubic cm of liquid, so they're the same. There is a proof gallon which only counts the ethanol content of the liquid towards the gallon, so a 100 proof alcohol would require 2 gallons of liquid to equal 1 proof gallon of liquor.
The greatest Simpsons car-and-measurement-unit bit is of course this one: "She'll go 300 hectares on a single tank of kerosene" which maybe makes sense if you're plowing a field... Part of a pretty amazing 20 second bit. Pure old Simpsons gold.
I think that's because they're not really equivalent. At least for me, a hole the size of 2 washing machines is something that will look close to two washing machines put together. That limits the shape it can have. On the other hand, 92 cubic centimeters doesn't. It could be a 1cm x 1cm x 92cm hole, which wouldn't be possible with 2 washing machines.
If we assume that the two washing machines are side to side, and that the average washing machine is 60cm x 60cm x 85 cm (height), that would be a hole 1.20m width x 60 cm depth x 85 cm height. The washing machine example is still easier to visualize, but it's also better than "a 612 000 cubic centimeters hole".
How do you accurately visualize whether "hole in the road" means you saying "what was that?" And driving on without slowing. Or whether the hole will require a crane to get your car to a place where it can be towed if you, possibly inadvertently, attempt to drive over it?
Aside from side by side vs stackable, every washing machine I've ever encountered is roughly the same shape. Some edges are rounder and the door might be on the front or the top but the shape is the same.
Yes, all the time when I lived in Atlanta. They frequently do road construction where they dig up rectangular underground vaults, then cover them up with giant “temporary” steel plates for years at a time. When the steel plates get dislodged, which they always do because they are not supposed to be permanent repairs, it leaves a gaping rectangular hole. I would estimate that the remaining hole is around the 4-washing machine size. When I was working on my MS at Ga Tech, a friend drove over one at speed, the car made it past but it sheared the oil pan right off the engine. Any Atlanta resident can validate that this is not BS. https://www.atlantamagazine.com/news-culture-articles/why-at...
> hole in the road that is about 92 cubic centimeters
92 cubic centimeters is a pretty small hole...
a hole in the road 1.5mx80cmx60cm is pretty easy to understand or imagine, when you know metric system and absolutely trivial to convert: ~0.70 cubic meters or ~700 liters or ~700.000 cubic centimeters
Washing machines comes of all sizes.
Is it like the slim one I have at home to save space or like the ones I find in laundromats?
Metric units have standards.
I don't know how many people would understand "a hole in the road of the size of 137 trays of home made tiramisù"
TBF here too when the media want to make analogies, they are pretty terrible: "an asteroid of the size of 8 soccer fields" means nothing to me, ~800 meters makes much more sense.
A big bottle of soda is 1000 or 2000 cubic centimeters. A can of soda is 200 or 300 cubic centimeters. A glass of water has 200 or 300 cubic centimeters. 92 cubic centimeters is half a glass of water.
It can get more extremes than memes. Some government agencies have policies specifically avoiding the metric system in public announcements. Issue a statement about a 30 centimeter wave event and a good percentage of people in coastal areas might panic. Trial attorneys also coach witnesses to never speak in metric as at least one person on every jury won't be able to follow ... and two more will hate you for forcing them to remember words they last heard in highschool.
I got decent with meters. Recently, I've been thinking about ways to visualize a billion. Here's one:
There's a billion cubic millimeters in a cubic meter (cubic yard). If you take a meter (yardstick) and visualize the 1000 millimeters in it, then make a plane of that 1000x1000, i.e. a million, then stack a thousand of those, that's a billion.
I still can't get my head around it, TBH. A billion is a lot!
But "billion cubes" are a nice unit; you can stack up a lot of them to get more billions.
I wonder if folks do that because its easier to picture a hole the size of two washing machines. That would be like 4-6 sq ft which can be more difficult to visualize.
Putting it that way made me immediately think that that's less than 4 cans per person. I would have thought that more actual cans of coke were in circulation.
I’m fond of odd measures. I like to say that something is the size of a ?'s head, for example, “that burger is the size of a cat’s head.” I also will describe a date as being a week and a half from some arbitrary date.
My problem with moving is always that once I've unpacked the books and the music stuff, I tend to lose interest so I end up with boxes of stuff lurking for months afterwards. Being married helps a bit, but my wife has her own blind spots and we still have boxes in the basement eleven years later that have yet to be unpacked.
A billion hours ago, human life appeared on earth. A billion minutes ago, Christianity emerged. A billion seconds ago, the Beatles changed music. A billion Coca-Colas ago was yesterday morning.
—Robert Goizueta, chief executive of the Coca-Cola Company, April 1997
I bet in 1-2 days you will find some twitter users who will write an essay about how we should harvest ocean sugar and plant more wheat instead of corn or sugar beets.
Sea grass already grows pretty much everywhere it can grow, so I don't think we can cultivate a lot more (at least not without disrupting other sensitive marine ecosystems). It's more important to prevent pollution that would kill existing sea grass.
Earth has something like 150 million square kilometers of ocean. 4mil is a tiny corner of that area. Depth/light remains by far the primary limitation for sea grass, preventing it from even attempting to colonize the vast majority of the worlds oceans. Compare other carbon sinks like plankton which can exist across the ocean irrespective of water depth.
Sure, but Im not asking why seagrass doesn't cover the entire ocean or entire planet.
I'm asking why it doesn't cover more area than it currently does it appears that light and substrate is an insufficient answer. 90% of the area with suitable light and substrate is not covered, so something additional is going on.
This article suggests that "92% of the UK’s seagrass has been lost in the past two centuries, with 39% disappearing just since the 1980s, thanks to pollution from industry, mining and farming, along with dredging, bottom trawling and coastal development."
"The research stated that if microorganisms consumed the sucrose stored by the roots of the seagrass, at least 1.54 million tons of carbon dioxide would be released into the atmosphere, which is equivalent to the carbon emissions from by 330,000 cars in one year."
Those number strongly suggest no. "A million tons" and "hundreds of thousands" may sound large but in this context they're tiny. And if we did try to farm these we'd have to displace other ecosystems for the farm land (under ocean).
There's a lot of work going into blue carbon efforts at the moment .. better understanding and utilising seagrasses and algaes, mangroves, etc. as carbon sinks.
That said, what I've never understood about the potential of seagrass as a carbon sink (and this sugar thing might go someway to explaining it), is how it works given how short lived individual plants are, and how fragile - and shallow - seagrass ecosystems are.
CO2 / methane (?) released by decaying biomass at depth may stay trapped in sediment, but how realistic is this at depths of 20-40m? Does anyone have any more info?
Yeah absolutely. My previous understanding was that the main carbon capture potential was simply in what ended up as part of the plant, rather than the portion being excreted / fed on by symbionts. That is fascinating news.
My question is that, given that the "capture" component relies on that carbon not being re-released into the atmosphere, how does "seagrass sequestration" fare given that seagrass meadows mostly occur in shallow waters, where the seafloor tends to experience higher levels of dusturbance compared to the deep sea (tides, currents, predation -of plants and sugars-, human impacts).
Seagrasses are short lived compared to trees. Soil / biomass carbon sinks are potentially easily disturbed. Do seagrasses still have a genuine/reliable/outstanding role to play in the carbon game?
> "Here, we show that the seagrass, Posidonia oceanica excretes sugars, mainly sucrose, into its rhizosphere. These sugars accumulate to µM concentrations—nearly 80 times higher than previously observed in marine environments. This finding is unexpected as sugars are readily consumed by microorganisms. Our experiments indicated that under low oxygen conditions, phenolic compounds from P. oceanica inhibited microbial consumption of sucrose."
A sugar like glucose is ~180 grams/mol. A µM concentration of glucose is going to be less than a milligram of sugar per liter of ocean water. In contrast, a liter of Coke contains ~120 grams of sugar (~ 0.6 M).
It's kind of interesting because the seagrass appears to be feeding sugar to bacteria, which might be doing nitrogen fixation in return, but it's hardly 'mountains of sugar'.
It's notable because it's free energy that isn't being consumed for some reason. Sprinkle some sugar on the ground outside and ants will swoop in and grab it in minutes.
That's not universally true. Saying that because I've personally accidentally dropped a 1kg bag of white sugar on the ground outside years ago which split open.
I just left the sugar there, figuring ants would clean it up.
Nope. Nothing touched it for around a week, until it rained, at which point it went away. Maybe the ants had a glucose syrup snack instead. ;)
Yes, and the carbon storage of all the seagrass sugar in the world is roughly equivalent to one day of automobile driving in the USA. But everywhere in the article it is phrased to make it appear like a world changing amount of carbon. Why?
It's my understanding that early steam engines were pretty rubbish until the underlying thermodynamics were understood and then you could engineer your way to a Watt Engine [0] that was revolutionary. The nearly two order of magnitude superiority of this sea grass on this metric is tantalizing.
> The study reported that the giant piles of excess sugar were not being consumed by the bacteria due to phenolic compounds released by the seagrass, which cannot be digested by many microorganisms. This was a key finding for the researchers, as it confirms that the carbon in the sugar stays in these underwater ecosystems and out of the atmosphere.
Interesting, sugar is so energy dense, isn't it just a matter of time until some organism figures out how to take advantage of it despite the phenols?
I'd guess that's correct. It reminds me of the Carboniferous era when there weren't any organisms around that could eat lignin, so dead trees just piled up until they were so thick, they turned into coal.
I'm not sure why you think it was sarcasm... the video is literally about that. 5.2K people liked that video, so how do we know that person isn't one of them?
Many (most?) animals cannot digest straight glucose, e.g. cats, which are obligate carnivores. I suspect most animals would have to be able to digest starches to be able to process sugars (though a good exception is the bee, so my surmise could be bogus).
I believe that cats don't even have sweet taste receptors. I've done "experiments" over the years, offering my own food to various of our household (terrestrial) pets. Cats and rodents are the most picky; dogs will eat a proper superset of what cats do, except that I have never had a dog that liked drinking milk (eating cheese, though, sure, and ice cream). Dogs seem OK with sugar (not crazy about it) cats are utterly uninterested.
I was curious, so I just mixed a teaspoon of sugar and water into a paste and put it in my dogs’ bowls. Two completely different breeds. Both went crazy for it.
Both love
Milk too. Neither dog will eat raw fruit
I had a dog which was absolutely crazy for cucumbers. He was typically sneaking into garden, sniffing for cucumbers among leaves, took it out and eat it. When I was peeling cucumber, he was salivating and whimpering to eat peelings, he would get angry if I didn't share at least some of of them. My current dog eats almost anything (he didn't like raw lemon), including most fabrics, but he's only a year old. Had to electrify the garden though because he digged and tried to eat compost.
An ancestor of all cat species lost a gene required for sweet taste, so none of them could taste sugar which could be why they became obligate carnivores.
The key here is "despite the phenols". What any such organism would need to develop is not so much a way to use the sugar, but rather a way to safeguard against phenols.
This is fascinating but how long before some enterprising person mines it and puts it in chic packaging and sells it to bougie consumers as “sea sugar” with implied health benefits?
This doesn't seem particularly novel. It's already well understood that plants deposit sugar into the ground they grow in to encourage beneficial bacterial and fungal growth. It's basically the plants gut: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhizosphere
I don’t understand the significance of this. What if we found huge quantities of sugar, what does it mean to me, to the oceans, to the environment? Not trying to be flippant, I am not able to make the connection, but can someone dumb it down and spell it out for me?
That's a unique unit of measure I've not seen before. I know in one of Gary Larson's old books he had a comment on his "skeletonize a cow in less than a minute" comic about how he loves weird units of measurement like this.
https://ifunny.co/picture/MMQBLmZr5
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