That's a lotta water!

They're opening up another spillway on the Mississippi: the Morganza Floodway.

This in an attempt to reduce the volume of water that continues to wend its way to the Gulf of Mexico via the main channel of the Mississippi River. The flow near the Old River is nearly 2,000,000 cubic feet per second. One cubic foot of water weighs 62.4 pounds, so that's over 120,000,000 pounds of water flowing past that point every second. Oof!

Let's assume that a somewhat larger-than-average house has approximately 2,500 square feet of floor space. If we also assume the ceiling is eight feet above the floor, that puts the volume of said house at (8 x 2,500) = 20,000 cubic feet. So the amount of water flowing past the Old River monitoring station is about 100 big houses full of water per second. That's a lot of water...

Thurs-demo: The recycled one

There's always too much stuff to do at the end of the semester. So I don't have a new demo. Instead, here's some video of the effects of liquid nitrogen on elastic materials:

Elastic vs. Rigid Behavior from Matt Kuchta on Vimeo.

Also, if you're looking for something current - check Riparian Rap's series of informative posts regarding the opening of the Bird's Point floodway.