Chapel Hill Chernobyl
One of the challenges of the recent Gulf oil spill is that parts of the story were too large to comprehend. We can grasp the fact that 11 workers died in the original explosion because we all know what 11 people looks like and we have a sense of scale – two people die in a car accident, hundreds in a plane crash, thousands in a year of war.
But what, exactly, do you do with 4.9 million barrels of oil floating on the open water?
It reminds me a bit of the Eddie Izzard routine about mass murderers, and our near-fascination with them when the numbers climb high enough. (Note: some of the language may be NSFW.)
In an attempt to make staggeringly large, but frustratingly nebulous environmental disasters a little easier to grasp, the BBC has developed a website to place the problem a little closer to home. Your home, to be exact.
Just select a category, type in your town or zip code, and see a Google map with the disaster in your area. Here’s the Chernobyl radiation cloud if the meltdown had occurred in Chapel Hill, North Carolina:
Chernobyl at Home
Sorry about that, Colorado. Our bad.
You can see some other options there, including the Pacific Gyre garbage patch, and the recent floods in Pakistan. I have to admit – seeing this flood layered on top of the US did more for my understanding than hearing “the flood has affected 160,000 square kilometers and killed 2,000 people.”
If you’re not in the mood for all of this death and destruction, you can also see how big the moon is compared to your home town (hint: smaller than the Chernobyl Disaster!), see the size of Ancient Rome, or trace the path of the Rio Carnival Samba Parade.
Can't get enough? Try these related posts:
