South African dam sluices 609 elephants per second
That's an awful lot of Olympic-sized swimming pools
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Regular readers know that we at the El Reg Bootnotes bureau are big fans of alternative units of measurement, so we'd like to raise a pint today to South African engineer Danie van der Spuy, who recently quantified the amount of water passing through the sluice gates of the Bloemhof dam as the equivalent of "609 elephants every second".
More delightfully still, Van der Spuy's pachyderm calculation is based on the fact that "during the last half of December and all of January", the gates sluiced "enough water to fill two million Olympic-sized swimming pools".
This represents a breathtaking 2,800m³ a second, and Van der Spuy helpfully suggested that to better visualise this deluge, you "should think in terms of elephants passing in front of your eyes at any given second".
So, if the average African elephant tips the scales at 4.6 tons, you're looking at the magic figure of 609.
Van der Spuy is a flood specialist who, along with colleague Brink du Plessis, keeps a close eye on dams and rivers. The report announcing the birth of the elephant-per-second standard concludes: "This past weekend the Fish River in Namibia went into flood with 1,000m³ (or 217 elephants) a second reportedly flowing into the Orange River about 100km from the Atlantic.
"At this point according to Du Plessis the Orange River is usually measuring 100m³/s or a mere 21 elephants a second." ®
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COMMENTS
lordy
enquiring minds want to know, is that 609 perfectly tessellated elephants per second, or are there gaps?
Precisely
Six hundred and nine elephants per elephant can be annotated as 609 elephant². In other words, by establishing the relationship between mass and time, you begin to demonstrate the concept of acceleration, and if you keep working on this you'll find that an infinitely small piece of elephant can quickly reach phenomenal speed, which is how light gets about so quickly.
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