While the American media has begun to concede that the BP oil spill (19-39 million gallons spilled in some estimates) is now the worst oil spill in US history, far surpassing the Exxon Valdes disaster (11 million gallons), the foreign press (Russia’s Press TV) is going further and calling it potentially the worst environmental disaster of all time.

The worst oil spill in the Gulf is the 1979 Ixtoc 1 rig blow up that spilled 140 million gallons into the water. But wiki has a list of the worst oil spills in history, the Ixtoc 1 coming in third, after the Iraqi Gulf War oil spill of 1991 and a spill in California, and I don’t see the Exxon Valdes spill even listed there. Confusing.

Here is a list of ten important oil spills which have some details about the quantities of oil involved.

I don’t know if the Press TV report is simply sensationalism or if it contains some truth.

Whatever the case, President Obama has extended the halt on new deepwater drilling permits for six months and stopped thirty-three deepwater wells in the Gulf of Mexico from operating.

Democracy Now adds:

The Center for Biological Diversity has filed a lawsuit to halt forty-nine offshore drilling plans in the Gulf of Mexico that were approved without full environmental review. Meanwhile, the group Food & Water Watch is leading an effort to shut down the Atlantis, another BP oil rig in the Gulf. The group warns an oil spill from the Atlantis could be many times larger than the current spill and even harder to stop.

Russia’s Press TV reported:

“The British Petroleum oil spill is threatening the entire eastern half of the North American continent with “total destruction,” reports say.

An ominous report by Russia’s Ministry of Natural Resources warned of the impending disaster resulting from the British Petroleum (BP) oil and gas leak in the Gulf of Mexico, calling it the worst environmental catastrophe in all of human history, the European Union Times reported.

Russian scientists believe BP is pumping millions of gallons of Corexit 9500, a chemical dispersal agent, under the Gulf of Mexico waters to hide the full extent of the leak, now estimated to be over 2.9 million gallons a day.

Experts say Corexit 9500 is a solvent four times more toxic than oil.

The agent, scientists believe, has a 2.61ppm toxicity level, and when mixed with the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico, its molecules will be able to “phase transition.”

This transition involves the change of the liquid into a gaseous state, which can be absorbed by clouds. The gas will then be released as “toxic rain” leading to “unimaginable environmental catastrophe” destroying all life forms from the “bottom of the evolutionary chart to the top,” the report said.”