The Christian Science Monitor has published a gallery of fifty-five photos of the ongoing BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill’s various effects in the Gulf of Mexico. It’s dramatic and informative even if you’ve been following the spill as closely as I have. Many of the photos, like this one above, also provide a rare sense of the scale of the oil that’s been added to the environment, and the experiment in pollution that is being conducted right now.

Other spill resources:

• New York Times’ Oil Spill Tracker interactive map—Note that the past seven days have seen a dramatic new landfall from Mississippi to Florida
• SkyTruth (blog.skytruth.org) attempts to study oil pollution using satellite maps. The site’s early estimates have now been corroborated by the government’s scientific panel’s recent upward revisions in its estimate of the quantity of oil being released.
• Treehugger.com’s Timeline of Unfortunate Events during the spill.

Sixty days into this disaster, I should have more to say, but there is a massive stream of commentary out there already. I would just add that: 1) The spill adds an entirely set of reasons to limit oil drilling, especially in remote areas, related to safety, disaster response, and local environmental impacts which is different from the climate and global warming issues that have driven the debate. 2) I witnessed some of the appallingly inadequate planning discussions (via public meetings of the Minerals Management Service) a decade ago. There are serious issues for long-term planning here. 3) Those of us thinking about strategies for addressing climate change should get much more serious now about large, but not global, energy policies—like drilling in the Gulf, or airport expansion, or every-increasing miles traveled by cars—instead of only fixating on overarching policy frameworks like carbon markets or taxes.