Surface oil accounts for only 5% of the total oil that has gushed out so far, so if we ALREADY have seen/measured the surface oil in the gulf to be around 12,000 square miles, how many square miles do you think that the oil would cover if all of it were to surface?
Divide .05% into 12,000 and you get 2,400,000 square miles and the closest country that I can get to that 2.4 square miles is Russia at a bit over 2 mil square miles.
Let's try that again:
12,000 = 5% of x ... where x = surfaced area of total spill.
Therefore x = 12,000 / 0.05 = 240,000 sq mi ... so you were only off by a factor of 10.
Unfortunately the media is, for the most case, 10x worse than you on their math and who knows what kind of fudge factors BP et al are using. If your numbers have any validity, this puts the potential surfaced oil (as of right now) at somewhere between the area of California (163,696 sq mi) and Texas (268,581 sq mi