Oregon “Dead Zone” (More Bad News About the Ocean)

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


For the fifth straight year, a dead zone, now the size of Rhode Island, has appeared off the coast of Oregon. As Julia Whitty reported in Mother Jones’ special report on the fate of the ocean,

“Dead zones occur wherever oceanic oxygen is depleted below the level necessary to sustain marine life, a result of eutrophication, or the release of excess nutrients into the sea, usually from agricultural fertilizers….For sea life, it’s as if all the air were suddenly sucked out of the world. Those creatures that can swim or walk away fast enough may survive. Those that can’t, die.”

And dead zones are further exacerbated by global warming. As the New York Times reports on the Oregon dead zone:

Jane Lubchenco, a marine biologist at Oregon State University, said the phenomenon did not appear to be linked to recurring El Niño or La Niña currents or to long-term cycles of ocean movements. That made Dr. Lubchenco wonder if climate change might be a factor, she said, adding, “There is no other cause, as far as we can determine.”

More on the state of dead zones, after the jump:

From Julia Whitty’s Mother Jones feature:

Robert Diaz, a hypoxia expert from the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, calculates the global number is doubling every decade. Furthermore, he suggests that at least in some areas hypoxia is rapidly becoming a greater threat to fish stocks than overfishing, since it disperses them off their feeding, spawning, and maturation grounds. And he predicts that hypoxic zones will only increase as the ocean warms further, citing a modeling study predicting that a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide will double rainfall across the Mississippi River Basin, increasing runoff by 20 percent and decreasing dissolved oxygen in the northern Gulf by up to 60 percent.

Close to 50 hypoxic zones fester on the coasts of the continental United States, affecting half of all our estuaries. The situation is worse in Europe, with 14 persistent dead zones that never go away, and almost 40 others occurring annually, the biggest and worst being the 27,000-square-mile persistent dead zone in the Baltic Sea, which is nearly the size of South Carolina. Not all of these are caused by riverborne nitrogen. Fossil fuel-burning plants along the Ohio River loft airborne emissions that help create hypoxic conditions in the Chesapeake Bay and Long Island Sound. Excess phosphorus from human sewage, as well as nitrogen emissions from automobile exhaust, impact Tampa Bay. Other dead zones suffer from the nitrogen fixation produced by leguminous crops.

Interestingly, we know how to solve these problems. Rabalais and others have engineered an action plan that calls for the reduction of the Gulf hypoxic zone to just under 2,000 square miles by 2015. “There are modeling studies that show if you reduce nitrogen fertil-izer applications by 12 to 14 percent, you can reach the target without losing crop production. And there are lots of ways to reduce,” she says, listing best management practices such as a reduction in fossil fuel use, cleaner municipal wastewater discharge, restoring wetlands, regulating pen-feed operations, and banning wintertime fertilizer applications.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate