The Clinton campaign took the trouble to leak the figure to Matt Drudge, a right-wing Internet journalist who broke the news of Bill Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky.
The explosion on the rig caused a well leak that the company couldn't control — it took 86 days and several failed attempts to stop the crude from hemorrhaging into Gulf waters.
Aware of this correspondence, Alfred Anderson of the University of Chicago and his colleagues studied the size of the bubbles under a microscope to estimate how long it took the magma to leak out.