2019 ‘Dead Zone’ In Gulf Of Mexico May Be Second Largest On Record

A recent forecast of the size of the “Dead Zone” in the northern Gulf of Mexico for late July 2019 is that it will cover 8,717-square-miles of the bottom of the continental shelf off Louisiana and Texas.

The unusually high Mississippi River discharge in May controls the size of this zone, which will likely be the second largest zone since systematic measurements began in 1985.

The water mass with oxygen concentrations less than 2 parts per million forms in bottom waters each year primarily as a result of nitrogen and phosphorus loading from the Mississippi River watershed, which fertilizes the Gulf of Mexico’s surface waters to create excessive amounts of algal biomass. The decomposition of this plant material in the bottom layer leads to oxygen loss.

The low oxygen conditions in the gulf’s most productive waters stresses organisms and may even cause their death, threatening living resources, including fish, shrimp and crabs caught there.

Low oxygen conditions started to appear 50 years ago when agricultural practices intensified in the Midwest. No reductions in the nitrate loading from the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico have occurred in the last few decades.

The predicted hypoxic area is about the size of the land area of New Hampshire and about 4.5 times the size of the Hypoxia Action Plan goal.

This estimate assumes that there are no significant tropical storms in the two weeks before the monitoring cruise or during the cruise. The estimate is made each year by LSU scientists Eugene Turner and Nancy Rabalais.

Article by Louisiana State University. The report is posted at https://gulfhypoxia.net/research/shelfwide-cruise/?y=2019&p=hypoxia_fc. Image credit NOAA.

Source: https://www.naturalblaze.com

Your Tax Free Donations Are Appreciated and Help Fund our Volunteer Website

Disclaimer: We at Prepare for Change (PFC) bring you information that is not offered by the mainstream news, and therefore may seem controversial. The opinions, views, statements, and/or information we present are not necessarily promoted, endorsed, espoused, or agreed to by Prepare for Change, its leadership Council, members, those who work with PFC, or those who read its content. However, they are hopefully provocative. Please use discernment! Use logical thinking, your own intuition and your own connection with Source, Spirit and Natural Laws to help you determine what is true and what is not. By sharing information and seeding dialogue, it is our goal to raise consciousness and awareness of higher truths to free us from enslavement of the matrix in this material realm.