What's big enough to cover the entire Lower Mainland, Bellingham and Mount Baker in Washington state, a third or Vancouver Island (including Victoria and Nanaimo) and enough of the Thompson-Okanagan to eclipse both Kamloops and Kelowna? Why the BP Oil Spill of course!

This image comes from a website called If It Was My Home, which allows you to center the BP spill over any place in the world you like. I was completely unprepared for the scale of this thing. Having been to most of the places on this map frequently, I know exactly how much distance is being covered, and it's a lot.

In this picture, I've centered the spill over Cultus Lake for maximum effect, but you can put it over top of Vancouver proper and eat up a lot more of Vancouver Island and the Georgia Strait. Or you could head over to io9 and see it over most of Scotland.

Attempts to cap the well continue to fail, so the spill is only going to get worse before it gets better. It looks like a relief well may have to be drilled before any real attempt can be made to cap the well. The coastline of the Southern U.S. has already suffered irreparable environmental damage. We can only hope that a significant amount of oil does not enter the Atlantic currents and spread ecological havoc.