via Flickr / bananiel
Nevermind that drone footage over the ill-fated Costa Concordia disaster site. Want to really get a bird's eye view of the scope of not only sunken ships, but the oily mess some of those doomed vessels are seeping into lakes and oceans? Look no further than NOAA's Potentially Polluting Wrecks in US Waters project, which--you guesed it!--charts all known shipwrecks in American waters that pose serious marine risk.
First, here are all known shipwrecks in the US--all 20,000 of them.
via NOAA
Of those, 573 met criteria in NOAA's prelimary list of vessel set for risk assessment. That was then lowered to 107, 87 of which were then handed over to the Coast Guard for further study. (The individual wreck reports of thsee can be found here.)
Outliers, to be sure. But still. Talk about an oil slick.
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