Good news doesn’t come as often as we’d like nowadays, so it’s nice to be able to report that this year’s Gulf of Mexico dead zone isn’t nearly as large as experts thought it would be. NOAA-sponsored forecast models predicted that it would be bigger than usual at 7,000 – 8,000 square miles, but the [...]
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Every summer, a vast, oxygen-deprived ‘dead zone’ appears in the Gulf of Mexico, courtesy of runoff from Midwestern farms that travels down the Mississippi River. But this year, scientists say, that dead zone could be bigger than ever.
Farmland runoff containing fertilizers and livestock waste flood the Gulf with nitrogen and phosphorous, which fuel explosive algae [...]
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