Strangely beautiful, at first. Then after a moment of staring the sickening magnitude of what one is viewing becomes apparent, leading to instant nausea.

I'm the sort of petty person who takes a cathartic pleasure in being able to tell people "I told you so", in the faint hope that they'll listen next time. There's no pleasure this time, just that sickening sinking feeling.

The Deepwater Horizon oil well, as suspected, is indeed leaking around 60,000 barrels per day (Contrary to BP's original, fatally-optimistic estimates). Tomorrow will be the 80th day of the spill. Minimal amounts of oil have been captured from the well. Do the math and you'll find that 4.8 million barrels of oil will have spilled into the Gulf of Mexico. That's nearly 769 million litres for those of us who are metrically inclined.

Also as suspected, all initial efforts to contain the spill have failed, because the pressure of the oil is too high. The only thing we can do is wait until the relief wells are completed. We must also hope that the relief wells, which have to be slant-drilled into the narrow conduit of the first well, meet their target space within a few inches. Drilling should be completed sometime in August, four months after the leak began. In 1979, it took nine months in shallower water (with less advanced technology, admittedly) to complete the relief well and cap the Ixtoc I oil leak.

I won't link to pictures or stories of what's happening to the wildlife because its just too upsetting. Needless to say, the environmental damage to the Gulf and the American coastal marshes is catastrophic. Will the next stop be Varadero's beautiful beaches in Cuba?

What I will post is a link to a computer simulation created by the University of Hawaii's School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology, which shows what will happen if the oil spill continues into late September. It's in August, around the 120-day mark, that the oil escapes the Loop Current and enters the Atlantic Ocean currents, affecting the entire U.S. Atlantic coast, and some parts of Europe.

Brace yourselves: This will get a lot worse before it gets better.