There’s Nothing Average About This Year’s Gulf of Mexico ’Dead Zone’
▻http://ecowatch.com/2016/06/13/gulf-mexico-dead-zone
The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released Thursday its annual forecast for the size of the Gulf of Mexico “dead zone”—an area of coastal water where low oxygen is lethal to marine life. They say we should expect an “average year.” That doesn’t sound so bad, but as we wrote last year, the dead zone average is approximately 6,000 square miles or the size of the state of Connecticut. Average is not normal.
The hypoxic zone in the Gulf of Mexico is the second only in the world to the flush of toxins from Eurasia that pollute the Baltic Sea. Hypoxic zones occur naturally wherever major rivers meet the ocean. However, human activity has increased their area, and these persistent dead zones lead to health threats, economic losses and diminished food supplies. Photo credit: NOAA
This is especially troubling when we know that solutions exist for reducing agricultural pollution, which contributes to the dead zone. And for many years, there’s been a lot of effort dedicated to reducing the #dead_zone’s massive footprint.
#hypoxie #agro-industrie #pollution #algues_vertes #littoral