I've twice visited the Arizona Memorial. Not much of the ship is visible above the water except a gun turret but the oil drops are still rising to the surface some 60 years later.

The Prestige sank in cold water thousands of feet deep. Let's hope that the conditions will limit the damage.

I heard someone ask today, what about the hundreds (thousands?) of oil-fueled warships and transports that sank in WWII? Combined, they carried many times the amount of oil on this one tanker. It appears the environmental damage from those sinkings was either fairly limited or was mitigated over time, or simply too dispersed to be a major threat. I seem to remember a passage from "The Ra Expeditions" by Thor Heyerdahl (sp) about how he saw a lot more signs of oil pollution than during his "Kon Tiki" expedition. If memory serves, Kon Tiki took place in the late 1940s not too long after WWII (and it was in the Pacific) while the Ra Expedition took place in the 1970s mostly in the Atlantic.

Like I said, let's hope the damage from this sinking doesn't get much worse than it already is.