Dead zones are caused by nutrient pollution, such as fertilizer runoff from agriculture, that adds phosphates and nitrogen to the water, causing massive algae blooms. The algae then die, and sink into the ocean, where bacteria consume it, sucking up the oxygen from the water and causing what is known as hypoxia, or a dead zone.
North America's largest dead zone is in the Gulf of Mexico: a 22,000-sq-km sea morgue the size of New Jersey.
Other dead zones have been discovered off California, in Lake Erie, around the Florida Keys, in North and South Carolina creeks and in Washington's Puget Sound. Together, they have turned 246,048 sq km of the seas - an area the equivalent of all five of the Great Lakes - into marine wastelands.
Because fish and other organisms can't live without oxygen, dead zones can be extremely detrimental to the fishing industry, as well as to aquatic ecosytems.
The good news is that with proper pollution prevention dead zones may be reversible. But, if we keep going the direction that we are going, all we have to look forward to is seas emptied of fish and filled with "soupy swill" - algae, bacteria and jellyfish and their ilk - the "rise of slime." This brave new ocean will resemble ancient oceans - a soup of primeval muck where "microbes and jellyfish . . . may constitute the only surviving commercial fishery"
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The challenge is removing the plastic out of the oceans and lakes to reduce the impact on the plankton which the fish eat, which we eat the fish. It is all connected. Yet, we live in a world where the landfills are full and companies and/or taxpayers don't want to pay to remove plastic from the ocean or dead zones. Interesting conundrum, eh?!
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