You can download a little application that will allow you, via Google Earth, to overlay the Deepwater Horizon oil spill onto the city of your choice. If that seems like too much work, you can just see some of the results. How does the spill compare to Tokyo? San Francisco? Washington, DC? Duluth?
Oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico: NASA's Aqua satellite captured this image of the Gulf of Mexico on April 25, 2010 using its Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument. With the Mississippi Delta on the left, the silvery swirling oil slick from the April 20 explosion and subsequent sinking of the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform is highly visible. The rig was located roughly 50 miles southeast of the coast of Louisiana.Courtesy NASA
One of my Dialogue Earth co-workers at the Institute on the Environment shared this NPR On the Media story with me this week, The Scale of the Spill.
The gist is that the media is incompletely describing the scale of the oil spill as a two-dimensional problem at the expense of quantifying the volume (of aquatic ecosystem) that is affected.
How long before it reaches the coast of South America and the Atlantic Ocean?
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