Holy Crap!

Yowza.

OMFG WTFIWWFP!

Thought about this exact scenario just yesterday.  Thanks for the post-up and awareness.  Murphy Oil in Sup-Town has plans, btw...

Murphy Oil Seeking Nearly 700% Wisconsin Refinery Capacity Expansion - The Coming Texification Of The Upper Midwest

Paul, stop knowing everything.

E., 378 million gallons were spilled by Iraqis retreating from Kuwait in 1991.

Check out this link for a history of major oil spills graphic.

A History of Major Oil Spills

Tony D:  Byron Dorgan is a senator from North Dakota, where the oil wells are.  Soil and oil, North Dakota has lots of rich resources.

Tony D:  I was born in ND so know of Byron's great influence on the state.  Way back in the day he was a young guy who was very active in the ND Jaycees, and has always been a very hard worker for the state.  Glad he is a senator, he is really a nice guy and admired by lots of people. ND is already a prosperous and smart state, in spite of its reputation (the movie Fargo, etc.).  I think lots of farmers just laugh all the way to the bank and when they sit for a "little lunch" they watch the oil pumpers go up and down, up and down.  You betcha'   Go ND!!

Thanks Paul.  

Reading Mark Morford's comments re: the BP oil blowout (cuz it ain't no spill or leak): says rather than this being 'Obama's Katrina' it will be 'Big Oil's Chernobyl'.  We will see...

Behold our dark, magnificent horror

The oil slick would take up a large amount of surface area, but not as much as you might think.  I have a friend that does software engineering for NOAA, and says that's a very limited guess as to what it would look like.

Think of it this way.  The volume of oil at its largest estimation is about 45 million gallons, or 7.7 times 10^6 m^3.  The volume of Lake Superior, using data from Wikipedia, is around 1.2 times 10^14 m^3.  That is a magnitude of 7 times greater, note, "magnitude".

If we assume it all sits on the surface, which most of it probably would, and since the surface area of the lake is 8.24 times 10^10, the percentage is (7.7*10^6)/(8.24*10^10).

Which is only about 0.009% of the lake surface.

The catch, of course is the fact it would disperse, but the math for that is hard to do, and oceans have tides that affect the dispersion differing it from the lake.

Even though that paper napkin math suggests otherwise, I actually think that the effects would be much worse on Lake Superior's ecology than on the gulf's.

Off by a factor of 4.  It would be more like 9% of the lake surface not including dispersion, but more importantly it would be more stagnant even with the water flow through the lake compared to the ocean.  I'll remember to check my work :-)