Question:

When billions of barrels of oil are extracted from artic will hole left be filled with melted ice cap?

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vast quantities of recently discovered oil offshore artic will be extracted by the half dozen countries sharing it. something has to fill the space left behind, if it is melted ice cap will this counter rising sea levels ????

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10 ANSWERS


  1. LOL!! that a good question


  2. apparantly mining in the artic is banned for a further 50 yrs

  3. no it wouldn't be noticed

  4. you should worry more about this http://www.livescience.com/environment/0...

  5. good old mother earth gets around pretty good for a girl her age and with all the action she gets that old hole will fill up really fast as long as you think in terms of geological cycles maybe a couple thousand years or a millon years what ever her cycle is.

  6. Theoretically speaking, when vast amounts of water or oil are pumped from the subsurface of an area the ground sinks, it is called subsidence. So technically it would actually lower sea levels by a tiny amount.

  7. There are wells drilled to 40,000 feet down-- nothing bad is ever going to happen-- as proved by a century of drilling with many wells already capped for decades.

  8. rhs is correct (as well as Tomcat).  The oil is contained within the groundwater and flows upward to some sort of geologic trap.  It is a very small percentage of the surrounding fluids.  If you extract billions of barrels, I would suspect that it would subside a little but it would also get replaced by the surrounding fluids.  One cubic meter is actually 6 barrels so 6 billion barrels would be a cube that has 1000 meter sides just to give it some scale.

  9. No.  Typically, extraction of oil from an underground formation doesn't affect its size; either the space gets filled with water (often brine), or it just remains empty.

  10. Not even, close, oil is on the way out, if this supply was used it would last ~2 years at our current rates of use.

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