Record Mississippi flooding is carrying chemical and fertilizer run-off from farms into to the Gulf of Mexico, which is predicted to create the largest "dead-zone," since we've started measurements, reports Deborah Zabarenko, the Environmental Correspondent for Scientific American, reporting a Reuter's wire story. Mississippi Floods Could Mean Huge Gulf "Dead Zone"
This year's record Mississippi River floods are forecast to create the biggest Gulf of Mexico "dead zone" since systematic mapping began in 1985, U.S. scientists reported on Tuesday. Often created by farm chemical run-off carried to the Gulf by the Mississippi, the 2011 low-oxygen "dead zone" could measure 8,500 to 9,421 square miles (22,253 to 26,515 sq km), or an area roughly the size of New Hampshire, the U.S. Geological Survey said in a statement.
This would be bigger than 2002's record-large hypoxic zone, which stretched over 8,400 square miles (21,750 sq km). The hypoxic zone threatens commercial and recreational Gulf fisheries. In 2009, the dockside value of commercial Gulf fisheries was $629 million.
The same nutrients applied to US farms to stimulate plant growth, nitrogen and phosphorous, stimulate growth of phytoplankton in the Gulf, after rain-off, carries them into and down the Mississippi river. When this extra Gulf marine plant life dies and rots on the bottom of the ocean, bacteria use up available oxygen choking off other marine life. Record rainfall is bringing much greater amounts of this dangerous farm chemical runoff this year.
Seen year-round but most pronounced in summer, the "dead zone" threatens resources including humans who depend on fish, shrimp and crabs, which need oxygen to survive.
There's plenty of oxygen on the surface of the Gulf, where fresh water from the Mississippi lingers, according to Nancy Rabalais, executive director of the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium, one of the authors of the forecast. But this oxygen-rich water cannot penetrate the salt water that stays beneath it, Rabalais said in a telephone interview.
"The effects on living organisms are in the lower water column and at the seabed," she said, adding that low levels of oxygen can be found anywhere from about 15 feet to 120 feet deep.
The Mississippi River Drainage Basin covers more than 1.2 million square miles and includes all or parts of 31 states and two Canadian provinces, stretching from New York state to Montana. Only the watersheds of the Amazon and Congo rivers are bigger.
It seems as if, every day, we hear more bad news about mankind's heavy and damaging footprint on our precious ecosystems of earth. To imagine that human beings have managed to create a 9,000 square mile dead zone, in the vast Gulf of Mexico, primarily from nitrogen and phosphorous originally applied to farms, is truly mind-boggling.
And, how much more sad and discouraging, can it be, when at a time when we are getting such conspicuous warnings that we need to urgently change our deleterious impacts on our environment, the Republicans, and Teabaggers are cutting funding to the very government agencies we need to be leading the way forward, such as the EPA, and FDA, and many others?
Do we have the collective wisdom and will to do anything about this? It would seem not. Our Republican's highest goal now is to slash government spending on the very agencies we should be beefing up to lead our corrective response, if we wanted to enhance our global chances for survival, without a cumulative environmentally induced crises to our ability to produce enough food for mankind’s still exponentially growing populations.
Democratic leaders should connect these conceptual dots in more conspicuous ways. In this example, failure to act to correct excess farm chemical run-off will continue to devastate Gulf marine ecosystems, and the vast economic benefits are fishing and tourism industries derive from them. Now it seems few are making these kinds of longer-term connections.
I believe it was Foucault who noted something to the effect 'the sound of the falling guillotine blades can have a remarkably focusing effect on a man's mind.' Sadly, this seems not to be true in our growing environmental crisis. How many more, or larger crises will we need before we reach a threshold that inspired the will to act on our own behalf’s?