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On Track For Another Record Gulf Dead Zone!
By My Wild Irish Prose | July 11, 2009
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PROBABILITY HIGH FOR ANOTHER RECORD BREAKING DEAD |
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Key References: RELATED LINKS
OMINOUS ARCHIVES
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When CatMap first reported on Dead Zones in 2006, scientists estimated there were about 100 DZs of various sizes scattered around the oceans, seas and gulfs of the planet. Fast forward to summer of 2009 and the number has now grown to something over four hundred. They’re hard to pinpoint sometimes, because dead zones are the essence of nothing. There is no oxygen in the water, and nothing lives there.
However, it appears that one of the biggest and deadest of the dead zones – right off the shores of Louisiana in the Gulf of Mexico – is on track to be one of the largest on record in 2009. The latest forecast, issued by University of Michigan aquatic ecologist Donald Scavia, predicts a dead zone of between 7,450 and 8,456 square miles. That would make three years of this decade worthy of placing in the top five Gulf dead zones of all time. The area of New Jersey is 7417 sq. miles. Now, a lot of the denial types** (DTs) – - have a tendency to make light of threats to a bunch of turtles and wetlands, you know, the kind of thing that chicks worry about. But these solid realists should be aware that in this case, the threat is to what was once a half-billion dollar fishery. That’s a lot of shrimp, groupers and tilefish floating belly up and not making it into the seafood gumbo.Professor Scavia, a professor at the U-M School of Natural Resources and Environment and director of the U-M Graham Environmental Sustainability Institute, describes the world wide plague of Dead Zones as “an ecological time bomb.” * A Dead Zone or Hypoxic Zone is a lifeless, oxygen-starved area within a body of water. Shellfish, regular fish and not much else can survive in these waters. It’s caused by the large scale run-off of phosphate fertilizers and urban pollution into oceans, gulfs and other bodies of water. In the Gulf of Mexico dead zone, for example, agricultural runoff from the farmlands of central U.S, travel down the Mississippi. The phenomenon was first noted in the 1970’s, about the time that monocultural agriculture began on a massive scale. Visit the CatMap for more.**Manly iconoclasts and rugged individualists who don’t like facts to interfere with wishful thinking |
Topics: Gulf of Mexico hypoxic, agricultural runoff, dead zones, nitrogen fertilizer pollution | No Comments »