The Dead Zone(s)

I am really going to miss sushi.

In the latest sign of trouble in the planet's chemistry, the number of oxygen-starved "dead zones" in coastal waters around the world has roughly doubled every decade since the 1960s, killing fish, crabs and massive amounts of marine life at the base of the food chain, according to a study released yesterday.

"These zones are popping up all over," said Robert Diaz, a professor at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science who led the study, published online by the journal Science.

Diaz and co-author Rutger Rosenberg of the University of Goteborg in Sweden counted more than 400 dead zones globally, ranging from expansive ones in the Baltic Sea and the Gulf of Mexico to small ones that episodically appear in river estuaries. Collectively, they cover about 95,000 square miles.

This could just be "Big Ocean" wanting a massive subsidy, but it's probably the result of hundreds of years of negligence. The oceans have been man's waste pit for centuries. Only now what we're dumping in them is having a decidedly harmful effect.

Low oxygen, known as hypoxia, is in significant measure a downstream effect of chemical fertilizers used in agriculture. Air pollution, including smog from automobiles, is another factor. The nitrogen from the fertilizer and the pollution feeds the growth of algae in coastal waters, particularly during summer.

The result is feast-then-famine: The algae eventually die and sink to the bottom, where the organic matter decays in a process that robs the bottom waters of oxygen. The ensuing die-off of marine life cuts down on the productivity of commercial fisheries. The "biomass" missing because of depleted oxygen in the Chesapeake Bay, Diaz estimated, is enough to feed half the number of crabs that are commercially harvested in a typical year.

Al Gore's insistence on climate change has actually narrowed the environmental debate. There are dozens of other problems, though many of them will residually come down as we start to use less carbon-based energy. The thing is that we actually can do something about this if we simply don't dump a bunch of crap into the ocean. Dead zones have disappeared in places where attention has been paid to them.

Unless we all adopt a taste for jellyfish, we'd better start applying these successes globally.