While you were thumbing through your Feb. 4 issue of Physical Review Letters, perhaps you noticed the article titled "Viscoelastic Suppression of Gravity-Driven Counterflow Instability."
OK, maybe not. But it was actually worth a look. It turns out the article describes how engineers might have been able to stop the BP blowout in the Gulf of Mexico last year using a child's plaything: oobleck. It's a weird mixture of cornstarch and water. When it moves slowly, it flows like a liquid. Move it fast, and it freezes into a solid.
The idea of using oobleck came to Jonathan Katz, a physics professor at Washington University in St. Louis, last May. He was on a small group of experts that U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu pulled together to advise him about the catastrophe.
So Katz was on hand when BP tried to stop the well by pumping a dense fluid called drilling mud down it — the so-called top-kill approach. It failed.
"We'd predicted that [would fail], so we were disappointed like everybody else was, but not enormously surprised," Katz says. "And so I was scratching my head and saying, 'Is there some solution to this problem?'
