U.S. scientists on Monday warned that because of runoff from human activities—such as urbanization and agriculture—this summer’s “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico is forecast to be one of the worst on record.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) estimated the dead zone will span 7,829 square miles while Nancy Rabalais, a marine ecologist at Louisiana State University, predicted it will cover 8,717 square miles.
“These numbers are far above the five-year average of about 6,000 square miles,” the Washington Post reported. The largest gulf dead zone ever recorded—8,776 square miles—occurred in 2017.
The gulf dead zone is primarily the result of nutrient pollution. The Mississippi River system carries nitrogen and phosphorus from cities and farms to the gulf, where the nutrients fuel an overgrowth of algae. The algae die, sink, decompose, and deplete the water of oxygen, which many marine creatures require for survival.
“When the oxygen is below two parts per million, any shrimp, crabs, and fish that can swim away, will swim away,” Rabalais told National Geographic. “The animals in the sediment [that can’t swim away] can be close to annihilated.”
By posing a significant threat to regional marine life, the pollution that causes the gulf dead zone jeopardizes the tens of billions of dollars generated by commercial fishing in the area.
“It’s just a major punch in the gut,” Ryan Bradley, a fifth-generation commercial fisherman from Mississippi, told the Post. Bradley plans to travel to Washington, D.C. this month to ask federal lawmakers to declare a disaster in the region, which would open up relief funding for local fisheries.
Dead zones occur across the globe, though the annual one in the gulf is considered among the world’s biggest. Experts partly credited the “abnormally high amount of spring rainfall” in the U.S. Midwest this year—which caused catastrophic flooding that could have a notable impact on both farmers and food prices in the long term—for the alarming new gulf dead zone forecasts.
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