Cow Crap from Illinois Caused Jersey-Sized Dead Zone in Gulf

The Mississippi has become a deadly river of shit and fertilizer, carrying the chemicals and waste from farms along its banks down into the Gulf of Mexico, where they have caused a giant oxygen-deprived ‘hypoxic zone’.  Commonly known as a ‘dead zone’, this swath of the gulf is unable to support life and its size is increasing by the day.

Now, researchers say they’ve identified where some of regions responsible for releasing the most phosphorous and nitrogen into the Mississippi River basin.

From GreenBiz.com:

The report, available at http://water.usgs.gov, follows on an earlier report that narrowed the culprits for 70 percent of the pollution leading to the dead zone to nine states: Illinois, Iowa, Indiana, Missouri, Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio and Mississippi.

From the report:

Almost all of the top 150 watersheds are in the Corn Belt or near the Mississippi River, with the highest yields of TN [total nitrogen] being in northern Illinois and central Indiana and highest yields of TP [total phosphorus] being from watersheds along the Mississippi River, and in northern Kentucky, and distributed through Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana. [...] Therefore, if one were interested in placing management efforts only in a specified number of the highest contributing watersheds, the watersheds to place efforts could be readily identified.

Last year, the NOAA predicted that the dead zone will increase to 8,800 miles – about the size of New Jersey.  [Insert joke about shit and New Jersey here. I'm too lazy.]

Now that the causes have been pinpointed, it’s time for the government to start addressing this problem. States need to start focusing their pollution-reduction efforts to prevent the dead zone from killing even more sea life.

GreenBiz.com reports that the EPA has announced three grants to Iowa State University researchers that would focus on reducing pollution runoff into the Mississippi River – it’s a start.

Link [GreenBiz.com]
Photo credit: Flickr user dipfan

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