Posted: Jun 18, 2010 11:24 AM by David Sherman (KRTV News-Great Falls)
Updated: Jun 18, 2010 1:42 PM
The explosion on the BP-operated Deepwater Horizon oil rig killed eleven crew members on April 20, 2010 and triggered an environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.
Since then, the oil has spread, and estimates of how much oil is pouring into the Gulf vary, with White House officials, BP representatives, and independent observers offering different figures.
Although the exact amount of oil that has leaked - and continues to leak - is not known, a Google map offers people the opportunity to get a graphical representation of how large the spill is.
The website If It Was My Home.com lets users enter their ZIP code, town, or region, and the site then super-imposes an approximate shape of the current oil spill over that area. Here is how the size of the oil spill looks when it is placed over Montana:

The creator of the website, Andy Lintner, explains:
The data used to create the spill image comes from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. NOAA releases a daily report detailing where the spill is going to be within the next 24 hours. They do this by collecting data from a number of sources, including satellite imagery and reports by trained observers who have made helicopter flights back and forth across the potentially affected areas. This data is entered into several leading computer models by NOAA oceanographers along with information about currents and winds in the gulf.
Click here to read continuing coverage of the Gulf oil spill on CBSNews.com.
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