Just in case it's not abundantly clear how catastrophic the ongoing Gulf oil spill really is, Google Earth is putting it in horrific perspective for you, letting you fathom just how enormous the spill is by transposing the giant mess over your home town. Via Paul Rademacher, a Google Maps engineering manager, here's the oil spill as it looks compared in size to NYC. As you can see, the oil slick is saturating the entire metropolitan area but carefully avoiding Newark, where even toxic oil is too scared to ooze.
