Question

If you took the amount of oil consumed in 2 months in 2013 worldwide, you could make a cube of oil that measures 10^3 meters on each side. How many cubic meters of oil is this? Do you think this would be enough to fill a pond, a lake, or an ocean?

Answer 1

• 10^9 cubic meters
• lake

Explanation:

You want to know the number of cubic meters in a cube that is 10^3 meters on each side, and whether that volume amounts to a pond, lake, or ocean.

Volume

The volume of a cube is given by ...

V = s³

where s is the edge length.

The volume of interest is ...

V = (10³ m)³ = 10⁹ m³

The volume of oil is 10⁹ cubic meters.

Lake

The sizes of ponds and lakes vary, but we might consider a pond to be a body of water larger than about 150 square meters and less than 6 meters in depth. On the other hand, a lake will generally be larger than about 4000 square meters. An average size lake may be about 10 meters in depth.

If we put the given amount of volume in a space with a depth of 40 meters, it would cover an area of about 25 million square meters, roughly 6000 acres. That is the area of a circle about 7 km in diameter. This might be considered a medium-sized lake.

The oil would fill a medium-sized lake.

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Additional comment

A "lake" is generally a body of water upwards of an acre in area. While an average lake in some areas is about 10 m deep, worldwide, the average is just over 40 m in depth. Some lakes are well over 20,000 acres in area.

A "pond" may be larger than a "lake", but will generally be smaller than 500 acres.

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