Oil’d from Chris Harmon on Vimeo.

Last year’s Gulf Oil Spill released 205 million gallons of oil — such a huge amount, it’s hard to get your mind around. To help conceptualize it, animator Chris Harmon created this amazing animated infographic – and it’s such a salutory lesson in the need for more careful use of resources that we have no qualms about re-posting it here on virtual-lancaster.

Consider it as one of those old public service announcements the BBC used to show…

To be honest, we don’t know what’s more staggering: the sheer amount of stuff we make from oil, or the fact that even without the spill, that quantity of oil still would have led to massive amounts of environmental destruction.