Two months after the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico began gushing, the scale of the disaster has only increased.  Sometimes scale can be difficult to visualize from news stories, but these oil spill visualization tools can help!

Parents: Talk with your kids about how the size of the spill compares to geographic areas they might be familiar with (e.g. your county, the size of the national park you visited on vacation last year, etc.)

Teachers: Have students try to identify land areas that might be the same size as the oil spill (e.g. small U.S. states, islands, and European countries), and then crunch the numbers to see how their guesses measure up.