Pollution from the BP oil spill

There's been a lot of talk about the slicks and plumes of oil from the Deepwater Horizon disaster, but how does the presence of that oil translate into measurable pollution in the air, water, and sediment? The EPA is now releasing pollutants and making the data available for analysis. Because the data are online, it's a simple process to read it into R and do visualization and analysis. The blog R-Chart shows us how to map the sampling locations around the Louisiana coastline, for example:

This is a simple analysis, but demonstrates the principle of working with this public data in R. It would be interesting to see some more in-depth analyses of the data.

R-Chart: Plotting BP Oil Spill Testing Data using R