Braggi
08-14-2008, 02:53 PM
We need to get away from fossil fuels as immediately as we reasonably can or we won't survive for long anyway.
We won't have time for global warming to kill us.
The global warming alarm isn't loud enough.
Buy local organic and go solar.
-Jeff
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Coastal "dead zones" spread globally, study finds
Thu Aug 14, 2008 4:50pm EDT
By Will Dunham
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - "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.
Nitrogen compounds from burning fossils fuels, particularly from power plants and cars, also are settling back to the ground and eventually wash into coastal waters, they said.
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.
The biggest one measures about 30,000 square miles 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.
"It's not sort of a local or regional problem, which is how it was thought of in the past," Robert Diaz of the College of William and Mary's Virginia Institute of Marine Science said in a telephone interview. "It is actually a global problem."
"Most of it is agricultural-based, but there is a lot of industrial nitrogen in there, too, if you consider electric generation industrial," added Diaz, who tracked the proliferation of the dead zones along with Rutger Rosenberg of the University of Gothenburg in Sweden.
The number of dead zones started to approximately double every 10 years starting in the 1960s, the researchers said. Continued...
https://www.reuters.com/article/environmentNews/idUSN1433625820080814?pageNumber=1&virtualBrandChannel=0
We won't have time for global warming to kill us.
The global warming alarm isn't loud enough.
Buy local organic and go solar.
-Jeff
==================
Coastal "dead zones" spread globally, study finds
Thu Aug 14, 2008 4:50pm EDT
By Will Dunham
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - "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.
Nitrogen compounds from burning fossils fuels, particularly from power plants and cars, also are settling back to the ground and eventually wash into coastal waters, they said.
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.
The biggest one measures about 30,000 square miles 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.
"It's not sort of a local or regional problem, which is how it was thought of in the past," Robert Diaz of the College of William and Mary's Virginia Institute of Marine Science said in a telephone interview. "It is actually a global problem."
"Most of it is agricultural-based, but there is a lot of industrial nitrogen in there, too, if you consider electric generation industrial," added Diaz, who tracked the proliferation of the dead zones along with Rutger Rosenberg of the University of Gothenburg in Sweden.
The number of dead zones started to approximately double every 10 years starting in the 1960s, the researchers said. Continued...
https://www.reuters.com/article/environmentNews/idUSN1433625820080814?pageNumber=1&virtualBrandChannel=0