I don’t know much about the science or engineering behind the BP oil spill but I’m smart enough to know it is a calamity. When I read in the paper that it covers x number of square miles I cannot comprehend in any meaningful way the size or magnitude of the spill. This web-site invites the visitor to input their hometown into its engine; it then shows you the area the spill would cover if ground zero was your hometown. With recent disclosures that BP and the Feds might not get this under control until Christmas (!) and the approaching hurricane season, calamity might quickly become an environmental holocaust for the Gulf region.
Eat My Peashoot
Eat My Peashoot 
It’s already bigger than Lake Ontario, for crying out loud. Thats’ a sobering visual. I am speechless about this disaster, frankly, but also angry — angry at myself for being partly responsible for the existence of “big oil” and angry that this already devastating oil spill, which will, as you wrote, last several more months (I’ve even heard years), will not likely put BP in the tank. They are simply too big to fail, in the sense that there’s no publicity debacle or clean-up expense that can’t be solved with the mountains of money BP enjoys around the globe.