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The Mystery of Oregon's 'Dead Zone'
Roland Piquepaille writes "The area off Cape Perpetua on the central Oregon coast is now a gigantic crab and fish graveyard. It was first discovered in 2002, but according to the Christian Science Monitor, researchers at Oregon State University (OSU) have taken a close-up look into this coastal dead zone. And things are getting worse. A few weeks ago, the researchers measured the level of dissolved oxygen in this part of the ocean. They found that levels were 10 to 30 times lower than normal, down to 0.5 milliliters per liter, a characteristic of hypoxia. And because they have no explanations about this phenomenon, they're even envisioning a total absence of oxygen, or anoxia. Read more for additional details and pictures about this mystery."
" And because they have no explanations about this phenomenon..."
Let me help them out here a bit then. The Oregon zone appears when the wind generates strong currents carrying nutrient-rich but oxygen-poor water from the deep sea to the surface near shore, a process called upwelling. The nutrients encourage the growth of plankton, which eventually dies and falls to the ocean floor. Bacteria there consume the plankton, using up oxygen.
No - I'm not so smart that I knew the answer, but google did - first (and several more) hit.
If those fish that are dying out there aren't worth protection under the free market, then they aren't worthy of survival.
Things that are truly important to humanity's survival will be preserved by market forces. Which means someone like Outback Steakhouse will take a genuine interest in their survival and will spend the money to stop these dead zones and prevent hypoxia/anoxia from happening.
If you really want to save the fish off of Oregon's coast, then put them on the menu.
[end right wing parody]
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Quoth the summary:
They found that levels [of dissolved oxygen] were 10 to 30 times lower than normal, down to 0.5 milliliters per liter, a characteristic of hypoxia.
In other news, having low levels of dissolved glucose in the bloodstream is a characteristic of hypoglycaemia; having lots of money is a characteristic of being rich; and a complete cessation of brain function is a characteristic of death.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
a gigantic crab and fish graveyard
I'd like to know more about these gigantic crab. Are they bigger than king crab? I love to eat crab legs.
What? You mean that it's the graveyard that's gigantic? Damn you, ambiguous English language!
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
If the article references the Christian Science Monitor, why the hell is the link to some linkjack blog at ZDNET?
/. editorship actually bother to check any of this?
Surely the original article (at CSM) should be the one linked, and not to some warmed-over plagiarised rehash at ZDNet? Do the
New mod option wanted: -1 DrunkenRambling
Lets not forget that China & India are also not signees.
Thus the three most populous continents on earth are simply not concerned.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Yes, but in the case of the Baltic, there is a natural bias towards a no-oxygen situation.
In the baltic we have a higher salt concentration in the bottom parts than nearer the surface (due to water runoff through all the rivers which empty out i the baltic). At the same time, the mouth of the baltic (e.g. the Danish straits) are shallow, usually only alloowing te surface water to freely exchange with the North sea (and hence the Atlantic). In most cases there is a weak outgowing current in the danish straits and only in special weather situations do salt and oxygen containing water enter the baltic.
The weather situations which may pump salt and oxygen into the baltic is large storms from the right direction and i recal readig that it is only about once every 2-3 years that that happens that significant amounts of salt water enters the deep parts of the baltic.
This phenomena (heavy salt rich water at the bottom, salt poor water at the surface) is also the same which makes the danish fjords vulnarable to hypoxia or anoxia (and incidently makes them nearly ideal for small submarines to operate in as a surface ship has no chance of hearing them through the thermo/hyalocline before they are close enough to launch torpedoes, which was the reason why the soviets took the danish navy serious durring the cold war).
There is alos other places where the geometry of the water basin results in natural anoxia (the black sea is i believe the largest). Similarly, in the geologic past, large costal water basins have been anoxic (as there is now oil there), so anoxic conditions is not by themselves some man made phenomena. It may be man made in the case in Oregon and in the case of the baltic, it surely does not help dumping all the polution from the rivers..
Yours Yazeran
Plan: To go to Mars one day with a hammer.
From the article:
"This overloads the waters with nutrients and spawns large algae blooms. The algae sink, die, and decompose, in a process that sucks oxygen out of the water and the topmost layer of sediment on the bottom, where many worms and shellfish live."
Fosfate/nitrate (among others) --> Nutritions for algae --> No oxygen
The "mystery" is where the polution is coming from.
It's always easy to blame the US for anything bad. It obviates the necessity of thinking things through.
Not that the USA is blame free, far from it. But I am amazed at what they get blamed for these days.
Informative, 5 ?
I live real close to this area, am on vacation in Lincoln City at the moment, and I'd like to say that when they say they have no explanations about this phenomenon you should not take that to mean that the annual upwelling of cold water from the bottom just off the continental shelf here is either news to anybody here or is a satisfactory explanation for what is going on here.
By the way, the part about the wind generating these currents, or currents anywhere, is wrong. Currents are generated by a combination of the earth's rotation, the uneven solar heating of the earth's surface and the underwater topologies of the world's oceans. Wind is better thought of as the atmospheric currents and the ocean current patterns clearly do NOT overlap the atmospheric currents.
OK, now, with that out of the way, the point is, nobody yet knows why everything is dead out there. Not you, Not Google, Not me, Not anybody - yet.
Cthulhu
cat
This is nothing new. Roland Piquepaille has been submitting stories which invariably link to his own blog (which carries a pale imitaiton of the original article) for ages. There have been accusations that he is paying the slashdot editors for the service of publishing his stories. See http://www.google.com/search?q=roland.piquepaille+ site:Slashdot.org.
It's nice to see that even mother nature's aquarium sometimes ends up looking like every aquarium I've ever owned.
You may find this diagram helpful:
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Joke --->
O
You --> -|-
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That's just a link to a Roland the Plogger blog, who doesn't understand the problem. Read the New York Times story, which has important facts the Plogger missed, like the fact that this has been happening for the past five years. The local paper, the Register-Guard, has a good story. "On the way down, the camera lens illuminates a nighttime blizzard, a flurry of broken chunks of plankton called "marine snow." This is evidence of what caused this year's hypoxia - an onslaught of nutrients brought to shallow coastal waters by wind-driven currents, whose decomposing structures suck up available oxygen."
This is no mysterious dramatic event. It happens every year, but this year, it's worse than usual, possibly because ocean currents have shifted due to weather.