This is an article that was almost painful to read, but sometimes reality is like that.

Climate change is likely responsible for the formation of a large dead zone that has formed off the coast of Oregon and Washington for the past eight years, researchers from Oregon State University said today.

That’s bad enough, but it’s not the most painful part.

Earth now has more than 400 dead zones with the count doubling every 10 years.

(Professor Jack) Barth says there are three dead zones caused by climate change - one off the coast of Chile and Peru, and two others off the east and west coasts of Africa.

He suspects the Pacific Northwest dead zones are part of a continuum with those off Peru and Chile, thousands of miles to the south.

Four hundred dead zones, the number doubling every ten years, and at least some suspected to be part of a system that extends for thousands of miles along the Pacific Coast. That’s the stuff of nightmares, and catastrophe. How long before we wake up and try to do something to prevent an oceanic disaster from happening?

The dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico has been one of those things that everyone knows is a problem, has a pretty good notion of what causes it, but complications involving who’s responsible for cleaning up the mess and enforcing the rules has prevented much of anything being done about it.

Looks like that’s about to change.

U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced a program Thursday that will provide the money over the next four years to Minnesota and 11 other states in the Mississippi River basin.

Calling the river “a critical national resource,” Vilsack said the Mississippi River Basin Healthy Watersheds Initiative will attempt to reduce excessive nitrogen and phosphorus runoff from farms that enters the river through its tributaries and creates a “dead zone” each summer in the Gulf of Mexico. The nutrients cause vast algae blooms that eventually die, sink to the bottom and are consumed by bacteria that rob the water of most of its oxygen.

My own gut feeling is that $320 million in funding will prove to be just a start on what’s needed to clean up the Mississippi River, but at least it’s a start, one that’s long overdue.

The problem is huge, it’s right there in front of our face, and yet we still haven’t really tried to do anything about it.

The “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico, an area choked by low oxygen levels that threatens marine life, is smaller than expected this year but more deadly, the government said on Monday.

The zone, caused by a runoff of agricultural chemicals from farms along the Mississippi River, measured about 3,000 square miles or about 1.5 times the size of the state of Delaware, compared with estimates that it would measure up to nearly 8,500 square miles, scientists said.

Unlike other efforts in other regions that have dead zones, such as the Chesapeake Bay and the Baltic Sea, numerical goals have not been set for reducing nutrients from areas near the Mississippi basin, (Donald) Boesch said.

The dead zone’s not going away until we control its source, all the crap that gets dumped in to the Mi8ssissippi River. That will take the cooperation of everyone who lives along the river and its tributaries. Given the current economic and political climate, that could take a while. Which means the dead zone will probably be with us for many years to come.

It’s taken years of effort involving dumping of waste from towns, cities and farms, coupled with a lack of any overall coordinating effort to control pollution, but that effort has finally paid off, and the Mississippi River Delta is now firmly established as the worst polluted marine ecosystem in the world.

Scientists at the University of California-Santa Barbara who performed the first integrated analysis of all coastal areas of the world conclude the nutrient runoff from upstream farms that flows down the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico is responsible for the most tainted coastal ecosystem in the world.

These nutrients have led to a persistent dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico caused by an overgrowth of algae that feeds on the nutrients and takes up most of the oxygen in the water, depriving other marine organisms of the oxygen they need to survive.

“Resource management and conservation in coastal waters must address a litany of impacts from human activities, from the land, such as urban runoff and other types of pollution, and from the sea,” said Benjamin Halpern, the study’s lead author, who is based at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis at UC Santa Barbara.

The next most polluted river delta in the world is the Ganges in India, followed closely by the Mekong in Vietnam and China’s Pearl River. They are all in danger of being polluted to death, but the Mississippi tops the list, pretty much insuring that the Gulf of Mexico Dead Zone will also continue to be the world’s largest. people can say whatever they want about the United States’ status in world affairs, but when it comes to polluting a major river system, no one does it better than we do.

It’s the first day of Summer, and while we’re all enjoying the longest day of the year, the annual Gulf of Mexico dead zone is taking shape. Sounds like this year’s could be a bad one.

A new study from NOAA was released and it predicts that the “dead zone” off the coast of Louisiana and Texas in the Gulf of Mexico this summer could be one of the largest on record. The dead zone is an area in the Gulf of Mexico where seasonal oxygen levels drop too low to support most life in bottom and near-bottom waters.

The dead zone size was predicted after researchers observed large amounts of nitrogen feeding into the Gulf from the Mississippi and Atchafalaya Rivers. The rivers experienced heavy water flows in April and May that were 11 percent above average.

Scientists are predicting the area could measure between 7,450 and 8,456 square miles, or an area roughly the size of New Jersey. However, additional flooding of the Mississippi River since May may result in a larger dead zone. The largest one on record occurred in 2002, measuring 8,484 square miles.

At least the predictions are short of the all-time record, but it would be better still if there was some expectation that the dead zone was shrinking year to year instead of maintaining nits size or growing.

if you’re interested, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration has a video up documenting the dead zone’s causes, location, and size. You can find it here.

Pollution in the Mississippi River is nothing new, that it feeds into a growing “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico has been known for several decades. So why does a report from the National Research Council on how to deal with the problem of run-off pollution in the Mississippi read as if no one had ever thought about it until today?

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and U.S. Department of Agriculture should jointly establish a Nutrient Control Implementation Initiative (NCII) to learn more about the effectiveness of actions meant to improve water quality throughout the Mississippi River basin and into the northern Gulf of Mexico, says a new report from the National Research Council. The report also advises how to move forward on the larger process of allocating nutrient loading caps — which entails delegating responsibilities for reducing nutrient pollutants such as nitrogen and phosphorus — across the basin. In addition, the two agencies should jointly establish a Mississippi River Basin Water Quality Center to administer the NCII and to conduct related water-quality monitoring and research.

“A Nutrient Control Implementation Initiative would represent an important step toward EPA developing water-quality criteria and states setting water-quality standards,” said David Moreau, chair of the committee that wrote the report and professor in the departments of city and regional planning and environmental sciences and engineering at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. “However, efforts to reduce nutrients in the northern Gulf of Mexico will face significant management, economic, and public policy challenges, as well as a time lag — a decade at minimum — between reducing pollutants across the river basin and identifying water-quality improvements downstream in the gulf.”

The Gulf of Mexico’s oxygen-depleted “dead zone” derives from excess nutrients, such as nitrogen and phosphorus from fertilizers and other sources, flowing into the gulf from the Mississippi and Atchafalaya rivers. Numerous federal and state regulatory agencies and water-quality standards govern conditions across the 31-state river basin. To better meet nutrient and sediment reduction objectives in the Clean Water Act — and in turn help improve water quality in the Mississippi River basin and into the northern Gulf of Mexico — EPA asked the Research Council for advice on how to initiate nutrient pollutant control programs, identify alternatives for allocating reductions of nutrient discharges into bodies of water, and document the effectiveness of these strategies.

Not that the report isn’t full of good intentions and ideas, but it’s main concern seems to be how to organize and cut across the lines that divide the many competing afgencies from working together to solve the problem. That’s a necessary first step, but one that should have been solved long ago. Long enough so that a National Research Council report could have been issued this week on how to solve the problem, instead of recommendations on how to get ready to solve the problem in, as the spokesperson put it, “a decade at minimum.”

One big problem involved with trying to stem the flow of run-off pollutants in to thye Mississippi river is the sheer scope of the problem. Crossing, as it does multiple state boundaries, the river is also under the jurisdiction of a multitude of government agencies, none of which have over-all authority. That makes the answer to “Who has the ability to clean up this mess” frustratingly close to an oracle-like “Everyone, and no one.”

That’s why today’s article from Environmental News Service is interesting. It’s about the launch of a cooperative effort to research and learn ways to reduce the amount of run-off from farms and fields that gets in to the river. The partnership includes businesses, farmers, and non-profit groups in a way that just might cut across all the jurisdictional barriers and get some results.

Conservation and agricultural groups announced a new initiative today that aims to reduce the polluting sediment and excess agricultural nutrients that flow off farm fields into the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico every year.
With a $5 million contribution from the St. Louis-based Monsanto corporation, The Nature Conservancy, the Iowa Soybean Association and Delta Wildlife will work with farmers to remove nutrients and sediment from agricultural runoff in the Mississippi River Basin.

The National Audubon Society will work with residents to find ways of improving wildlife habitat and the quality of water entering the Mississippi River.

Jerry Steiner, executive vice president at Monsanto, said, “We’re proud to work on this bold conservation initiative which we believe offers a sustainable vision for agricultural landscapes wherein farmers can support our world’s growing needs for food, fiber and fuel in ways that not only preserve water quality, but also support diverse and abundant wildlife populations.”

Monsanto, of course, is one of the largest manufacturers of herbicides in the world. it would be easy to question their participation in this, but the funding’s got to come from somewhere. Plus, no proposed solution is actually going to work unless farmers actually follow it out in the fields, and that’s a lot more likely if it has the support of businesses they’re used to dealing with. A growing Dead Zone in the Gulf of Mexico is only the most dramatic of what’s happening as a result of pollution in the Mississippi River. The project launched by Monsanto, The Nature Conservancy and others probably won’t find all the answers, but it could serve as a model for how to organize to deal with the problem.

Here at Thinking Outside we’ve spent some time chronicling the extent of the Gulf of Mexico dead zone. It’s of particular interest here because of its persistence and the fact that it is caused in large part by how land is managed here in the midwestern United States.

The Gulf of Mexico is not alone in having a dead zone, however, and a new report shows that the phenomena is now a wide-spread global problem.

“Dead zones” in coastal waters – regions of ocean floor so deprived of oxygen that most marine life cannot survive – are spreading worldwide at an alarming pace, scientists said on Thursday.

Driving the trend are nitrogen and phosphorous from chemical agricultural fertilizers that reach coastal waters after flowing off farm fields and into streams and rivers, according to the study published in the journal Science.

This decade alone, the number of coastal dead zones has risen by about a third to 405 worldwide, with clusters on the coasts of the United States and Europe. Combined, they take up an area of at least 95,000 square miles (250,000 square km).

The biggest one measures about 30,000 square miles (80,000 square km) in the Baltic Sea, the researchers said. This is followed in size by one in the Gulf of Mexico starting at the mouth of the Mississippi River in the United States and one at the mouth of China’s Yangtze River in the East China Sea.

So we’re only number two when it comes to the size of our dead zone. Come on guys! A little more fertilizing, a little more wetlands draining, a little less conservation, and a continued neglect of urban water systems and we can still be number one!

As if there wasn’t already enough bad news associated with the midwest floods.

Floodwaters loaded with farm runoff are heading down the Mississippi River, and scientists fear the deluge will dramatically increase this summer’s dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, covering an area the size of Maryland.

You have to wonder if we’re going to learn any lessons here. I saw a report on CNN this morning about how after the last big flood year in 1993, a lot of talk was made about restoring swamp areas, allowing the natural scheme of things to hold water in the kinds of wetlands that used to line much of the Mississippi River. That commitment lasted about five years and the CNN report took place from the parking lot of a huge strip mall in Missouri on land that was going to be set aside, but instead development was allowed and now if a levee breaks the whole place will be under eight feet of water.

Now with the above quoted article about the dead zone we can see the consequences of how we’ve managed the river are both long-term and wide-spread in addition to immediate and threatening. No doubt in the next weeks we’ll hear talk of the wisdom of setting aside wetlands to help control flooding, questions will be asked about why we finance re-building and development in obviously flood-prone areas. Whether it will make any actual difference in what we do will remain to be seen.

Summer is fast approaching, and with it comes the unwelcome return of the Gulf of Mexico dead zone.

Researchers predict a “dead zone” of oxygen-depleted waters off the Louisiana and Texas coasts could grow this summer to 10,084 square miles — making it the largest such expanse on record.

If the preliminary forecast holds, the researchers say, the size of the so-called “dead zone” would be 17-21 percent larger than at anytime since the mapping began in 1985 — and about as large as the state of Massachusetts. Another forecast is planned next month.

The report Monday from scientists at Louisiana State University and the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium is based on May nitrate loads on the Mississippi River at Baton Rouge.

It’s all about nitrogen based fertilizers running off the land and into the Mississippi River. But if a ten thousand square mile stretch of ocean where nothing can live doesn’t make people take stock of the situation and look for a better way to manage the land, whether its farmers growing corn or homeowners in quest of the perfect lawn, then you have to wonder if anything ever will.