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The Gulf of Mexico has ~1,592,800 square/km of volume, at an average depth of 4,874 metres. (reference)
The average discharge of the Mississippi River system is 12,740 cubic meters/sec... and if even 0.0035% (a liberal estimate) of that volume is agricultural, it can be argued that it is in fact a miniscule runoff."
the point is that all of this runoff is coming out of the mouth of the delta. What does a running river do when it hits dense salty walter of the gulf coast? It spreads out and slows down, dumping a great deal of its sediment load. While im sure a goodly amount of the fertilizer and pesticide remains dissolved, the fact remains that the river output is not being evenly distributed across the gulf and into the ocean at large. It is building up and contributing greatly to the already present anoxic or dead zone...
Slashdot Mirror
" The Gulf of Mexico has ~1,592,800 square/km of volume, at an average depth of 4,874 metres. (reference) The average discharge of the Mississippi River system is 12,740 cubic meters/sec... and if even 0.0035% (a liberal estimate) of that volume is agricultural, it can be argued that it is in fact a miniscule runoff." the point is that all of this runoff is coming out of the mouth of the delta. What does a running river do when it hits dense salty walter of the gulf coast? It spreads out and slows down, dumping a great deal of its sediment load. While im sure a goodly amount of the fertilizer and pesticide remains dissolved, the fact remains that the river output is not being evenly distributed across the gulf and into the ocean at large. It is building up and contributing greatly to the already present anoxic or dead zone...