dead zones grow in the gulf of mexico
Posted by admin on 10 Jun 2008 at 05:55 am | Tagged as: devastation, toxic life, water
How U.S. farming policy leads to ‘dead zones,’ huge marine areas where nothing can grow, by Kent Garber.
Each spring, the cycle of death begins anew. Nitrogen and phosphorus, leached from fertilizer, pass from farmland into streams, from streams into rivers—the Mississippi, the Potomac, the Susquehanna—and then, finally, into some of the country’s great bodies of water: the Gulf of Mexico, the Chesapeake Bay. There the chemicals collect each summer, spawning the growth of algae, which deplete the water of oxygen and lead to ghostly aquatic wastelands. Marine life, if mobile enough, will swim away; the rest will suffocate and die.
Scientists have monitored the growth of these so-called dead zones since the late 1970s. They have tried to promote policies to reduce their size, without much success. Last summer, the dead zone along the Gulf of Mexico coast spanned nearly 8,000 square miles— its third-largest occurrence on record and roughly the size of Massachusetts.
Farmers are effectively killing the ocean, by spraying poisons on the land. And the problem is getting worse thanks to biofuels.
Spurred by recent ethanol mandates and, to a lesser extent, high commodity prices, U.S. farmers are planting record-size crops. From 2006 to 2007, corn acres rose by about 15 million, mostly in the Mississippi River basin. Mid-Atlantic farmers are expected to plant 500,000 more acres of corn, soybeans, and wheat this year than they did in 2006, a 7 percent jump.
To grow more crops, particularly corn, farmers usually have to use more fertilizer. Fertilizer runoff is the primary contributor to dead zone formation, the source of three quarters of the nitrogen and more than half of the phosphorous in the water. In a recent study, researchers at the University of British Columbia and the University of Wisconsin found that the U.S. government’s goal to produce 36 billion gallons of ethanol by 2022, with a maximum of 15 billion from corn, would most likely increase the nitrogen flow to the Gulf by 10 to 20 percent.
In Australia they have the same problem with the marine Areas around the Great Barrier Reef!
Really sad that unique natural areas have to suffer because of this…