Deepwater Horizon Explosion
This company was the leaseholder, operator, and principal developer of the field where the Deepwater Horizon Drilling Rig disaster occurred.
What is BP (or British Petroleum)?
Commercial nuclear power plants currently generate electricity by splitting atoms, a process known as this scientific term.
What is nuclear fission?
These are the two most abundant elements in oil and gas.
What are hydrogen (H) and carbon (C)?
Completed in 1936 on the Colorado River, this massive concrete dam stands as an iconic symbol of Great Depression-era engineering.
What is the Hoover Dam?
She was the first person to win two Nobel Prizes, discovering polonium and radium.
Who is Marie Curie?
This US state was closest to the Drill.
What is Louisiana? (Distance: 40 miles away!)
Made from materials such as cadmium and boron, these mechanical components move in and out of the reactor core to regulate the power output.
What are control rods?
Stretching across West Texas and New Mexico, this geological basin is the largest oilfield in the United States.
What is the Permian Basin?
James Watt's refinement of this technology in the late 1700s revolutionized long-distance travel by both train and boat.
What is the steam engine?
He patented the first commercially practical incandescent light bulb at Menlo Park.
Who is Thomas Edison?
The drill shack explosion claimed this many lives.
Named after a Soviet scientist, this blue glow is produced when electrically charged particles travel through water faster than the speed of light in that medium.
Accounting for roughly 16% of the global market, this nation produces the most oil worldwide.
What is the United States? (USA)
A holistic map of 20th- and 21st-century nuclear reactor disasters would feature these three sites.
What are Chernobyl, Fukushima, and Three Mile Island?
He discovered electromagnetic induction, paving the way for the electric motor.
Who is Michael Faraday?
~1.5 Million Gallons Oil/day leaked into the Gulf of Mexico as a result of the Deepwater Horizon leak for this many days.
What is 87? (Accepted range: 70-100)
Generating roughly 65-70% of its electricity from nuclear reactors, this nation is the most nuclear-reliant country in the world.
What is France?
This technology has revolutionized oil drilling since the 1990s, but has also been linked to earthquakes.
What is horizontal drilling?
Aside from human and animal labor, this combustible material harvested from forests served as the primary source of thermal energy in the Roman Empire.
What is wood? (Other acceptable answers: biomass)
A voyage across the Mediterranean Sea inspired him to prove that the blue color of the ocean is caused by the molecular scattering of light, not sky reflection. This discovery that light shifts in wavelength and energy when scattered by molecules won him the 1930 Nobel Prize.
Who is Sir C.V. Raman?
BP paid this much money ($, total costs) in restitution for the damages caused by the disaster.
What is 65 billion? (Accepted range: 40-80 billion.)
Fun fact: A historic global civil settlement of a whopping 20.8 billion occurred, which remains the largest environmental damage settlement in U.S. history.
Commissioned in Pennsylvania in 1957, this facility became the first full-scale, purely commercial nuclear power plant in the United States.
What is the Shippingport Atomic Power Station?
Coined during the Pennsylvania oil boom, this term describes an independent oil or gas prospector working in unproven territory. (Hint: the term combines an untamed feline with a seeker of fortune.)
What is "wildcat/wildcatter?"
Code-named for the borough where it was headquartered, this WWII defense initiative oversaw the earliest research into controlled nuclear chain reactions.
What is the Manhattan Project?
Coined the term "Mother of Nuclear Power," she provided the first theoretical explanation for how splitting a uranium nucleus releases massive amounts of energy.
Who is Lisa Meitner?