Man-Made "Dead Zone" In Gulf of Mexico the Size of Connecticut

Taco Cowboy writes Somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico there is a man-made "Dead Zone" the size of the State of Connecticut. Inside that "Dead Zone" the water contains no oxygen, or too little to support normal marine life, especially the bottom dwelling fish and shrimps. The "Dead Zone" measures about 5,000 square miles (13,000 square kilometers) [and] is caused by excess nutrient runoff from farms along the Mississippi River, which empties into the Gulf. The excess nutrients feed algae growth, which consumes oxygen when it works its way to the Gulf bottom. The Gulf dead zone, which fluctuates in size but measured 5,052 square miles this summer, is exceeded only by a similar zone in the Baltic Sea around Finland. The number of dead zones worldwide currently totals more than 550 and has been increasing for decades.

Comments

So?

[the eric conspiracy]

This has been going on for a long time. It's due to drainage of basically the Great Plains out into the Gulf. Lots of fixed nitrogen from fertilizers in that these days. That nitrogen stimulates a variety of organisms that also use oxygen. Which there really isn't all that much of in water.

The only way you are going to stop it is to find a different method of raising food for the world. Hint: current organic methods doesn't do it - too labor intensive and yields suffer.

Or you could have less people.

Re: So?

[BaronM]

As neither a farmer nor a marine biologist, I should probably shut up, but hey, this is Slashdot!

I have to wonder how much use of synthetic fertilizer could be reduced by systematic crop rotation between corn and legumes to fix nitrogen naturally rather than dumping on the land? I suppose the price would probably be yields down/food prices up, but food is historically cheap at the moment.

Re:So?

[unimacs]

The problem isn't just fertilizers, it's also that runoff is fast-tracked into lakes, streams, and rivers that lead to the Gulf. If instead we restored some wetlands and allowed the rivers to move beyond their banks now and then rather than just making the banks taller, you wouldn't have so much water flowing into the Gulf at such a furious pace dragging a ton of silt with it. It would have time to be filtered naturally, replenish aquifers, and grow plants instead of it all ending up in the ocean.

Re:So?

[ehynes]

Or we could simply eat less meat since much of the corn and soybeans grown in the midwest are just fed to animals.

Re:So?

[Applehu Akbar]

Great idea! But we would probably need more labor for this to work. To soak up the unemployed pool in the US, we could send them to Africa in an ecologically sound fleet of wind-powered ships built from natural nonmetallic materials.

Re:So?

[Anonymous Coward]

Another thing we could is invest 100 billion dollars into African agriculture. You could grow a huge amount of food in Africa,
it's just the initial investment that's the problem, building roads, transferring farming gear, etc..

That "etc" being "killing the people who then show up claiming the land is theirs, and you have one minute to leave or die."

White people had great farms in Africa. Then the national governments decided it wasn't fair that white people owned large farms. So they either killed or ran off the colonialist oppressors, and gave the land to proper black Africans. Who proceeded to let the productive farms turn to wastelands because they have no idea how to work together, much less actually farm year after year.

(Posting AC just because I don't need the grief.)

Re:So?

[danbert8]

Or we could ditch ethanol for fuels... Or stop paying farmers to go crops that there isn't demand for.

Don't Color Me Surprised

[rmdingler]

Of course there's anthropogenic change to the environment.

We have gone forth and multiplied,

to the great detriment of our bluegreen, slightly elliptical, biosphere.

How big is it?

[prisoner-of-enigma]

To put this in perspective, 5,000 sq. mi. is a square about 71 miles on a side. Compare this to the total area of the Gulf (615,000 sq. mi) and you'll see this "dead zone" occupies just 0.8% of the Gulf. Is this something that needs addressing? Absolutely. But it's not some horrific cauldron of death like the headline tries to make it out to be.

Re:This is no dead zone.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

It is a life opportunity area. Give it a chance.

That's 'Photosynthetic Entrepreneurship Incubator', please... A carefully constructed program of Nitrogen Incentives has (quite literally) grown trillions of Green Jobs in the dynamic and competitive Algae sector. Truly an achievement to be proud of.

Yes, some people, driven by the politics of envy, allege that the disruption of legacy 'oxygen breathing' business models is a problem rather than a sign of progress; but that sick desire to prop up uncompetitive organisms with the dead hand of state wealth redistribution has no place in a free society!

Re:Nice

[ColdWetDog]

Calm down. It's been worked out for your viewing pleasure.

Re:No one give a fuck about Connecticut

[ArmoredDragon]

Don't forget: We also hate the poor and minorities too. We want to see them all die so that there is nothing left in this universe but a few rich white men with no earth (because as you yourself state, we hate that too.)

(Disclaimer: I'm not a Republican, but I typically get lumped with them because most people can't see beyond simple left and right.)

Get the neutient right at least

[Anonymous Coward]

It has been known for a long time now that this has *nothing* to do with nitrogen. Nitrogen is never the limiting factor for algae growth. Neither is potassium. So, you have one major fertilizer to guess - yes, it is phosphorus.

Phosphorus runoff is *the* reason for dead-zones and algae blooms. Stop phosphorus runoff, and you fix one of the major problems we have today that not only affects The Gulf, but many of the sweet water lakes too.

The only way you are going to stop it is to find a different method of raising food for the world. Hint: current organic methods doesn't do it - too labor intensive and yields suffer.

Wrong on both points.

1. You do not have to stop using fertilizer if you prevent runoff from getting into rivers and lakes in sufficient quantities to cause problems. This means less ditches, more wetlands, and stop of draining wetlands to get substandard farmland.

2. If people had nothing but organic farming, we would certainly not run out of food. Even if yields were 50% lower (and they would not be), there would still be plenty of plant food to eat. Maybe meat would be more expensive and people would start only eating meat once a week, like 100+ years ago, but there certainly would be enough food to go around.

Secondly, even 100% pure organic farming using natural fertilizer does not solve the problem of phosphorus runoff.

Re:0.17%

[Anonymous Coward]

That kind of percentage is a bit misleading. The awkward bit about dead zones is that they occur along the coast in exactly the kind of spots that would otherwise be good for supporting marine life ( a lot of open ocean tends to be nutrient-depleted and middling lifeless... coastal areas have a lot more going for them; the stuff washed out of rivers is a great food source normally).