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Gulf of Mexico DEAD ZONE caused by agricultural runoff from U.S. farms

August 22, 2017

Image: Gulf of Mexico DEAD ZONE caused by agricultural runoff from U.S. farms
(Natural News) Every year, a hypoxic zone appears along the Gulf of Mexico. Otherwise known as a “dead zone,” it is an area of water that contains little to no oxygen. The significantly reduced levels essentially makes the body of water a biological desert. Hypoxic zones usually occur around summertime. But while these areas are considered to be a natural phenomenon, scientists fear that increased human activity may be contributing to the number of dead zones being observed worldwide. More disturbingly, human factors may also be causing the hypoxic zone in the Gulf of Mexico to grow. Scientists predict that for this year, the hypoxic zone in the area will cover 10,089 square miles. This is about the size of Vermont. Biologists declare that bold and new approaches need to be made now to prevent a biological crisis. They have expressed a desired target reduction of 59 percent in the amount of nitrogen runoffs in the area. This would shrink the hypoxic zone to the size of Delaware.

Approaches to achieve this end are identified in a new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Researchers from the University of Michigan believe that this goal is achievable, though it would require the adjustment of large scale agricultural practices. The magnitude of the problem prompted an intergovernmental panel to extend the reduction program to 2035. This should give enough time, official spokespeople of the panel say, to achieve the goal of a hypoxic zone with a size of only 1,950 square miles.

 

What truly causes a hypoxic zone is yet to be fully determined, but scientists believe that the one in the Gulf of Mexico may be due to excessive farmland runoff containing fertilizer and livestock waste.

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Ocean Life Faces Mass Extinction, Broad Study Says

January 18, 2015

Ocean Life Faces Mass Extinction, Broad Study Says

A team of scientists, in a groundbreaking analysis of data from hundreds of sources, has concluded that humans are on the verge of causing unprecedented damage to the oceans and the animals living in them.

“We may be sitting on a precipice of a major extinction event,” said Douglas J. McCauley, an ecologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and an author of the new research, which was published on Thursday in the journal Science.

But there is still time to avert catastrophe, Dr. McCauley and his colleagues also found. Compared with the continents, the oceans are mostly intact, still wild enough to bounce back to ecological health.

“We’re lucky in many ways,” said Malin L. Pinsky, a marine biologist at Rutgers University and another author of the new report. “The impacts are accelerating, but they’re not so bad we can’t reverse them.”

Scientific assessments of the oceans’ health are dogged by uncertainty: It’s much harder for researchers to judge the well-being of a species living underwater, over thousands of miles, than to track the health of a species on land. And changes that scientists observe in particular ocean ecosystems may not reflect trends across the planet.

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