• Question: scientifically, how much wood could a wood chuck chuck if a wood chuck could chuck wood?

    Asked by rebecca125 to Adam, Chris, Eleanor, Jessamyn, Sinead on 14 Nov 2013.
    • Photo: Adam Murphy

      Adam Murphy answered on 14 Nov 2013:

      A woodchuck would chuck all the wood he could
      if a woodchuck could chuck wood!

      But really, a woodchuck is a groundhog, which is a little mammal (About the size of a 2 litre milk carton) that lives underground. They spend most of their time on fours legs and they need them to balance, so usually, no wood at all!

      Or could say they could probably toss acorns, which grow into big oak trees. Then they could toss whole forests!

    • Photo: Eleanor Holmes

      Eleanor Holmes answered on 14 Nov 2013:

      OK, let’s show our work.

      Your average woodchuck (or groundhog) weighs about 3 kg*.
      The strongest mammals in the world can lift between 0.8 and 2 times their own body weight. I don’t know how strong a woodchuck is, but I’ll be generous and say it can lift 0.5 times it’s own body weight. So it can carry 1.5 kg at a time.
      It only needs to chuck the wood and it is an efficient burrower so we’ll say it can chuck 1 chunk of 1.5 kg wood per second.
      So our little woodchuck can chuck wood at a rate of 1.5 x 60 = 90 kg/minute.

      Now we didn’t give our woodchuck a time limit. Technically it could just keep chucking until it runs out of wood. So let’s see how much wood there is!
      Determining the weight of a tree is incredibly complicated (without cutting it down and putting it on a scales, that is) so I’m going to make a very rough estimate. Your average tree weighs 4500 kg. So our woodchuck could chuck this entire tree in 50 minutes.
      That’s one tree. 7.8% of the globe is covered by trees. That’s a surface area of 510,072,000 km². 510,072,000 x 0.078 = 39,785,616
      Which I will round up, because this is already ridiculous, to 40,000,000 km² of trees.
      We’ll reason that you can plant 250,000 trees per square kilometre. Each tree is planted 2 metres apart. So there are approximately 250,000 x 40,000,000 x 4500 = 45,000,000,000,000,000 kg of wood on the planet. And Woody the Woodchuck could chuck ’em all!

      If we continue at the current rate of deforestation (130,000 km² per year) little Woody will run out of wood to chuck in 300 years.

      However, the average lifespan of a woodchuck is 12 years. So if Woody chucked morning and night for his entire life he could chuck 568,000,000 kg of wood. Does that answer your question?

      *All of my numbers are based on estimates, not experiment. Numbers can be changed as we get more information, but the method of arriving at the answer will stay the same. Neat, huh!?

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