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The Gulf of Mexico’s “dead zone” will be equal to or greater than the size of the state of Connecticut this year, placing the area of depleted oxygen in which nothing can live at well past its average size over the period since records of it were kept, scientists announced Thursday.
The zone is subject to flux due to winds and currents, and in the long run could end up smaller than predicted, according to a report released by Dr. Nancy Rabalais of the Louisiana State Universities Marine Consortium.
The chief contributor to the area, Rabalais said, is runoff from the Mississippi River. Scientists have long known that runoff from farming in the Midwest and south is largely responsible for the occurrence. The Midwest connection, caused in part by a heavy presence of nitrogen due to fertilizer and other farming-related compounds that get into soil and then travel downriver.
“The predicted hypoxic area is about the area of Connecticut and 29 percent larger than the average of all years, including years with storms. If the area of hypoxia becomes as large as predicted, it will equal about 3.5 times the size of the goal of the Hypoxia Action Plan (i.e., less than 5,000 km2). No progress has been made in reducing the nitrate loading.”
Highly mobile organisms such as shrimp, crabs and finfish generally leave hypoxic zones for areas more favorable to their existence, following food sources.
“These areas are sometimes called ‘dead zones’ in the popular press because of the absence of commercial quantities of shrimp and fish in the bottom layer,” Rabalais’ report reads. “The number of dead zones throughout the world has been increasing in the last several decades and currently totals over 550 … The dead zone off the Louisiana coast is the second largest human-caused coastal hypoxic area in the global ocean.”
The 2015 hypoxic zone off the Louisiana coast, contained in this year’s new estimate released by LUMCON.
