Reply #6: Great post. Already wasn't the best before the BP Crime

[Catherina]

This article was written 3 years ago :(

Despite promises to fix it, the Gulf's dead zone is growing
By Bruce Eggler

June 09, 2007, 10:17PM

Every late spring, it forms 12 miles off the Louisiana coast and lasts for months: a sprawling, lifeless band of water known as the "dead zone."



Shrimp trawlers steer clear, knowing the low oxygen in this part of the Gulf of Mexico makes it uninhabitable for fish and other marine life. It starts at the mouth of the Mississippi River and can extend all the way to the Texas border, many years growing to the size of Connecticut.
It's not a natural phenomenon. Waste water and fertilizer runoff from farms and towns hundreds of miles up the Mississippi pour billions of pounds of excess nutrients into the Gulf, sparking unnatural algae blooms that choke off the oxygen needed for the food chain to survive.

Under a process that's been in place for the past decade, a federal task force and a team of scientists appointed by the federal Environmental Protection Agency will meet in New Orleans this week to tackle the problem.

But more than five years after the task force pledged to reduce the dead zone to a quarter of its size by 2015, it's still getting bigger. A boom in corn production for ethanol is bringing more farmland on line, leading experts to predict near-record sizes this year.

Targeted federal funding for the dead zone is unlikely to appear, and scientists say voluntary measures to reduce the runoff have fallen short.



Meanwhile, researchers fear that the dead zone's persistence could permanently alter the Gulf's ecology, from the worms and bottom-dwelling organisms that anchor it all the way to the prized fish at the top.

"You reach a point where you've shifted the ecosystem to a completely different domain, and the recovery from that may be impossible," said Don Scavia, a professor of natural resources and environment at the University of Michigan and former National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientist who led one of the first federal studies on the dead zone in 2000. "There will be a time where the critters that typically occupy the sediment in those areas can no longer recover."

Evidence of the dead zone goes back to the 1940s, but research shows it has grown exponentially in the past four decades.

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http://blog.nola.com/times-picayune/2007/06/despite_promises_to_fix_it_the.html