It’s not only the Gulf of Mexico that’s suffering from “dead zones” caused by excess nutrients, such as nitrogen and phosphorus used as fertilizers.
Marine dead zones are spreading in the Baltic sea, and that could cause the entire ecosystem to collapse for lack of oxygen. Dire warnings from Lasse Gustavsson, Swedish head of the World Wildlife Funds branch in Sweden.
If you have visited Planet Save for any length of time you will no doubt have seen me talk about the increasing amount of ‘dead zones’ cropping up across our planets watery surface. In particular, the Gulf of Mexico is home to what is believed to be the largest dead zone in the world: an area larger than Rhode Island that is almost totally devoid of oxygen in the water.
This particular dead zone has formed, in part, thanks to farm runoff that has made its way down the Mississippi River, all the way from Iowa and Wisconsin. Chemicals used on the farms are washed in to local waterways, which all eventually end in the Mississippi which thus makes its way down and out past New Orleans in to the Gulf of Mexico.
Photo Source: marinebiology.edu
In case you didn’t know, the “dead zone” isn’t just a novel by Steven King or an old TV show, it’s an area about the size of New Jersey in the Gulf of Mexico that during the summer months is incapable of supporting sea life. The dead zone is created when fertilizer run off promote algae growth, which in turn throws off the oceans equilibrium by using all the available oxygen, killing everything else. So, good for algae perhaps, but bad for the sea life in general.
Carectomy recently reported that ethanol production for passenger vehicles could be responsible for a growth in this dead zone. In their words:
Corn is the biggest culprit in creating these environments, and now that the U.S. is looking to biofuels as a solution to its energy needs, the problem’s only getting worse. Bush signed legislation at the end of 2007 that will triple the amount of corn ethanol produced over the next several years.
More after the jump!
It looks like ethanol subsidies may impede efforts to reduce the size of the Dead Zone in the Gulf of Mexico. A draft report from the EPA Science Advisory Board says that ethanol subsidies could lead to a dramatic increase in nutrient loading in the Mississippi river basin, due to diverting cropland to corn production.
Recent energy policies, combined with pre-existing crop subsidies, tax policies, global market conditions and trade barriers all provide economic
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