The Living Oceans Society have put together an ani­mated inter­ac­tive model of hydro­log­i­cally real­istic oil spill sce­narios on the BC coast­line. It has lots of fea­tures, but it can be com­pre­hended faster by using it than having it described, which is a great thing. You can add bird habitat, fish migra­tion routes and the like to the map, then watch them get oblit­er­ated when the ocean cur­rents turn the wrong way. It’s super cute, and appro­pri­ately scary.

Oil ship­ping, pro­cessing and extrac­tion has been strongly reg­u­lated in BC, but a number of serious threats have been coming up in the last few years (e.g. there is a long-​​standing mora­to­rium on even exploring for oceanic oil off the BC coast, but the gov­ern­ment is now claiming that it can’t find the piece of paper where that was written down). Public oppo­si­tion has been strong and will get stronger. This model con­tributes to that dis­course with a nice mix of mod­eling, GIS and infoporn.

Footnotes on their data sources and pro­cessing tech­niques are here.