Tracking and visualizing the relative size of the recent dramatic can be done in many different ways.

Earth engineer Paul Rademacher created "", which cleverly uses a Google Earth plugin to overlay an image of the oil spill on top of any map of your choosing. By simple size comparison, one can quite accurately estimate the surface area.

The New York Times features a to show the most current estimate of the extent of the oil slick on that day. It is remarkable to observe the changes in the shape of the spill each single day.

PBS highlights the oil spill with a numerical counter display, called the , allowing users to dynamically estimate the daily amount of spills in terms of gallons by themselves. When one likes numbers (and numbers only), than this is the information display for you.

A more descriptive explanation comes from Al Jazeera, in the form of an animated infographics movie which investigates the issues engineers are facing in trying to stem the flow of oil.

Are there any other interesting oil spill visualizations out there?

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