The Tracker made up the above hed’s sin and mortality reference, but a Science magazine report today of worsening hypoxia in coastal regions is getting a great deal of attention for other good reasons. The journal’s website calls the predicament “The Suffocation of Aquatic Systems.” That is powerful imagery. It’s summary further proclaims that dead zones, or areas of low oxygen in the sea, are “among the most serious environmental problems of the 21st century.” Triggering their proliferation is the overgrowth of algae and such that bloom in the nutrients of agricultural and industrial runoff – and then die, sink, and rot. The cycle feeds microbes that use up much of the water’s dissolved O2. Their area, it says here, is rising exponentially, doubling every decade lately.  Then you have your overfishing, and acidification, and warming, and invasive species, and jellyfishification, not to mention turtle egg poaching and folks who want to dump tons of iron in the sea to soak up CO2 ….. what a spectacle.

The study finds 95,000 square miles of low-oxygen ocean in 405 separate pools. One is in Chesapeake Bay, not far from the study authors’ offices. It’s not natural, and it is likely why striped bass are suffering a bacterial disease.

Stories:

NY Times Bina Venkataraman writes it dramatically, but the story’s well inside. The zones, it says here, tend to occur in prime fishing grounds ; Wash. Post Joel Achenbach who in his lede calls it the “latest sign of trouble in the planet’s chemistry” ; Reuters Will Dunham ; AP Randolph E. Schmid ; Toronto Globe and Mail David Hutton localizes it to include the Gulf of St. Lawrence and Lake Winnipeg ; San Francisco Chronicle David Perlman piles up the bad news but adds – none of these things in SF Bay now and one that was there has been fixed with better sewage treatment – and few in California. His story suggests that this is one calamity that can be fixed ; Time Magazine Unmesh Kher similarly closes with ways to attack the problem ; Telegraph (UK) Roger Highfield calls dead zones “free of oxygen” in his lede, which exaggerates things. They are hypoxic, not anoxic. The rest of the piece appears careful. He also notes that one of the UK’s small dead zones, in the Mersey estuary, has been fixed via better management ;  Guardian (UK)  David Adam  ; Sci. American David Biello ; Science News Rachel Ehrenberg ; LiveScience Andrea Thompson ;
Related News: ANI (via Economic Times of India) reports dead zones are players in a baleful report in PNAS.

Grist for the Mill:  William & Mary/Va. Inst. of Marine Science Press Release (with a link to a google earth map);

Also See: Several previous posts on these things. “Dead Zone” in this site’s search engine turns them up (plus a few extras).

Pic: Global, hi res

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