Convert Board Foot (board foot) to Petaliter (PL) instantly.
About these units
Board Foot (board foot)
A board foot is a unit of volume used in lumber, defined as a board measuring 1 foot long × 1 foot wide × 1 inch thick, equal to 144 cubic inches, or about 2.36 liters. The unit reflects a material-centric approach to volume: rather than measuring empty space, the board foot measures solid wood content, crucial for pricing logs, boards, and woodworking materials. Forestry operations, sawmills, and lumber yards rely heavily on board-feet calculations to estimate yields from logs, determine pricing, and evaluate timber resources. The unit persists due to deep integration with North American construction and carpentry practices.
Petaliter (PL)
A petaliter represents 10¹⁵ liters, a massive unit used to quantify the total water content of oceans, polar ice sheets, or planetary atmospheres. Oceanographers may describe the Pacific Ocean's volume or the total ice volume of Antarctica in petaliters; these scales cannot be expressed meaningfully in smaller units without imposing huge, impractical numbers. The PL is also sometimes used in astronomy to approximate ocean-like features on other worlds, such as subsurface oceans on Europa or Enceladus. It represents one of the largest practical volumetric units before entering pure theoretical measurement.