The Deepwater Horizon spill and Google Earth

How big is it? Check out this site that uses Google Earth to show you. You can enter you hometown and watch it get swallowed whole.

If centered on London, the spill reaches from Brighton on the coast to Cambridge in the north. If centered on San Francisco, it completly covers San Francisco bay, reaching from Vacaville in the north to beyond Pelican Rock near Santa Cruz. If it were possible to adjust the orientation of the spill graphic, you'd see that it would completely cover Long Island in New York.  Not Manhattan. Long Island. Place it on the big island of Hawaii and that paradise almost completely disappears.

And this is just what we can see on the surface. From SPACE, for crying out loud.

Rep. Edward Markey, Chairman of the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming has stated that he will be placing live feed of the blowout on his website. It was supposed to go up last night. It's still not there.

This is a crisis of epic proportions. The oil will enter the loop current and it will spread across the Florida Keys and up the East Coast. It's only a matter of time. Some say, it's already happening. The Gulf of Mexico will become one huge dead zone. Fishing and shrimping in the entire Gulf will continue to suffer for years to come.

BP claims to 5,000 barrels a day having been leaking from the site since the explosion on April 20. Yet they claim that the mile-long tube they're currently using to siphon off  part of the oil is pulling in 210,000 gallons a day. They admit they're not capturing everything, though just how much they're missing is apparently a state secret.  Other estimates put the extent of the spill much higher than BP's.

Steve Wereley, a mechanical engineer at Purdue University in Indiana, told The Associated Press that he is sticking with his estimate that 3.9 million gallons a day is spewing from two leaks.

His estimate of the amount leaked to date, which he calls conservative and says has a margin of error of plus or minus 20 percent, is 126 million gallons - or more than 11 times the total leaked from the Exxon Valdez disaster in 1989. 

It's been a month that this well has been spewing into the Gulf of Mexico. One month. Only now is BP considering killing the well by injecting drilling mud into it.

This should completely destroy BP. There should be no way that they can recover, yet we know they will soldier on. And keep making a profit, just like Exxon did after the Valdez.

They should rot in hell.