Putting Deepwater Horizon In Context

When dealing with a spill the size of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, it can be hard to wrap your head around the sheer size of the numbers. They’re used so casually, but just what do they actually mean? At a current maximum of 60,000 barrels per day (“current” only because estimates have been rising since the spill began), it is now officially the largest spill in US history. That’s a far cry from the original estimate of 1,000 barrels per day publicly stated by Coast Guard Rear Adm. Mary Landry. (For a timeline of the evolving spill estimates, check out CNN’s summary).

In an attempt to explain the sheer scale of the disaster, more than a few news outlets and a few enterprising online hobbyists have created maps, videos and interactive tools. Here are just a few of the online demonstrations trying to put some visual context on the Deepwater Horizon disaster and its environmental fallout.

CNN A time-lapse video that shows the expanding, and moving, footprint of the spill.

If It Was My Home Using Google Maps, this site allows you to impose the Deepwater spill onto any location. Imposing the spill on the land we’re familiar with goes a long way to making it seem more real.

Trying To See Through An Oil Spill

Image: New York Times

In the aftermath of the explosion that destroyed BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig on April 30, oil hasn’t been the only thing leaking out — the disaster continues to draw headlines every day in major newspapers around the world.

In Canada, feedback has ranged from calls to restrict further offshore drilling, which have so far been rebuffed, to attempts to capitalize on the environmental fallout by calling attention to Alberta’s oil sands and the relative benefits in light of open sea leaks. Any organization with a stake in petroleum can be expected to make their point on an issue as large as the spill literally is.

As the weeks go on — and, at present, all indications are that the leak will continue for weeks to come — Flow will be aggregating some of the most pressing questions on the disaster.

In the meantime, PBS has released a widget that calculates the total amount of crude oil based on a range that runs from the lowest published estimate (210,000 gallons a day) to the worst-case scenario. While it’s hard to contextualize the size of the spill — though the New York Times provides a time-lapsed map of the area — the widget provides a sense both of its possible scale, and of the differences that different estimates make when the scale of the disaster is already so huge.

For Monday, May 10, here is a quick rundown of some of the most interesting articles published on the BP Deepwater Horizon spill.

• The increasing dependence on deep-sea robots (Scientific American)
• A slideshow of the US Coast Guard’s response to the fire (Scientific American)
• Changing the design of the containment dome (The Globe and Mail)