Gavin Potenza has a nice infographic about oil spills which attempts to put Deepwater Horizon into perspective. Deepwater is bad, but not nearly as bad as others, especially the gulf war oil spill when Iraqi forces intentionally emptied 11 million barrels of oil into the gulf from several tankers at the Sea Island oil terminal. Unfortunately I ( Read more... )

I was reading about the Deepwater Horizon and was amazed at the size of the thing. Here's the rig itself, to scale. It's 97.4 meters tall, with 41.5 meters underwater. But there's also 1260 meters of water to the bottom, and the actual oil is at -10685 meters.


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I try to be fair. Earlier this week when my officemate told me that Sarah Palin blamed environmentalists for the oil spill. "A fact is not automatically incorrect just because Sarah Palin has said it", as they explained on "Left, Right, and Center" today, and I thought her idea kinda made sense. If environmental laws prevent drilling in shallow ( Read more... )