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If this continues, all seafood may be as plentiful as caviar. (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26202398/)

http://www.cleanmpg.com/photos/data/501/080814_DeadZones_hlarge.jpgAP - August 14, 2008

This does not look a natural cyclical pattern, but an escalating man-made one...black dots are dead marine zones - Ed

Washington - Like a chronic disease wasting a body, ocean "dead zones" with too little oxygen for marine life are spreading around the globe, researchers reported Thursday.

The experts counted 405 dead zones in 2007 — a third more than their 1995 survey.
"The number of dead zones has approximately doubled each decade since the 1960s," the researchers wrote in the journal Science… http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26202398/

You can thank ethanol for a large part of the gulf of Mexico zone. Since corn requires more fertilizer per acre, the runoff is killing parts of the Mississippi river into the ocean.

And according to some, ethanol is supposed to be eco-friendly.

Eco-friendly my foot.

Thanks for the post because it led me to a very good (free) download:

ftp://ftp.fao.org/agl/agll/docs/fertusebycrop.pdf

124 pages long (warning)

It does not discuss corn, but a medium to high rate for that crop would be 100 kg/ha (from other sources). The highest rate in the FAO document is for bananas (p.74); 470 kg/ha NPK total which is more than 400 for N alone (trust me).

Corn is indeed the biggest "N consumer" in the US, driven by total planted area, not the dose rate as such.

These dead zones are a big deal. As are the energy requirements to produce the fertilizer, and the nitrous oxide released from wet, fertilized fields. Yes it's laughing gas, but also absorbs infrared very strongly. Not a really good thing to put in the atmosphere.

There are a lot of mouths to feed though, and getting that done with less energy and air and water pollution remains a daunting task. Any of your kids interested in careers in ecology? Doesn't pay as well as computers or pro basketball, but it needs doing. Really.

DAS

This definately has to suck to people that like fish and seafood, thankfully I never been able to stand the smell or taste of that stuff. On a serious note, it would be nice if we, as a whole, could get these areas cleaned up and figure out ways to produce our needs with less polution. For example, from the mining process to final product of batteries to the delivery of this countries hybrids. I'm sorry but we are talking about some seriously major polution. This is why I can't wait for the big guys to get off of there tails and start building hybrids here in the US and hopefully mandait some clean refineries for the nickle closer to home.

The map may be too small, but look at the dead zones that can't support sea life:

The entire US Gulf Coast
The entire US East Coast from Florida to Maine
Europe from Normandy, the British Isles, North Sea, and much of the Baltic
The southern half of Japan and South Korea
At least a third of the US West Coast

You can thank ethanol for a large part of the gulf of Mexico zone. Since corn requires more fertilizer per acre, the runoff is killing parts of the Mississippi river into the ocean.

Wrong twice. It's not that corn requires more fertilizer, it's that cheap artificial fertilizers have gotten many farmers in the habit of dumping far more than needed on their fields. And any excess added to grow more corn for ethanol production has hardly had time to make its way to the sea yet.

Hummm... Now that I think about it, maybe that's wrong three ways. Haven't we been hearing a lot about how ethanol production increased the demand for corn, driving up the price for corn used for food & animal feed? But if the amount of corn grown had increased all that much, the price wouldn't have risen.

The map on the linked article is bigger and very depressing. Human activity has exacerbated pre-existing hypoxic regions and when you see it in black -- wow.

Not all of the corn supplied has met the demand so the price didn't fall.

next time you fertilize your lawn or use round-up - think about it - you are also helping to kill the oceans

The map may be too small, but look at the dead zones that can't support sea life:

The entire US Gulf Coast
The entire US East Coast from Florida to Maine
Europe from Normandy, the British Isles, North Sea, and much of the Baltic
The southern half of Japan and South Korea
At least a third of the US West CoastAnd yet people surf fish from east coast shorelines all the time, and they even catch stuff.

That map is too small, and the dots indicating "dead zones" are too large and run together. No need to spread panic about the entire coastline not supporting acquatic life. Trust me, jump in the water off most of the NJ coast and a crab will bite you or a jellyfish will sting you. Or both. ;)

wdb,

Maybe dead zone is too strong in implying lifeless, but it's not as robust.

Counter question: should we wait until our coasts are truly lifeless then decide it's time to act? ;)

Diaz and Rosenberg have been researching this for quite a while. Eight years ago

http://disc.gsfc.nasa.gov/oceancolor/scifocus/oceanColor/dead_zones.shtml

they predicted doubling in less than a decade, which is about what happened.

The global maps are indeed too coarse, but if you go to the Science magazine website, the 2008 supplementary online material can be downloaded freely. It includes a long table with much more detail.

DAS

Counter question: should we wait until our coasts are truly lifeless then decide it's time to act? ;)Glad to see that smiley. :)

I've 'acted', as you say, for most of my life. One of my neighbors discovered ecology a few years ago (about 10 years, back when it had fallen from favor, much to their credit). At dinner one night they drilled my wife and I on our wasteful ways and were quite taken aback when they discovered that we really didn't generate all that much waste. It's our habit, we don't even think about it. And it makes sense in so many ways that it's been a no brainer right from the get-go.

That having been said, I'm very much opposed to doomsaying and fearmongering in the name of anything. Fearmonging is what got us into Iraq. Americans in particular seem to be exceptionally easy to prod into doing just about anything if one uses fear to drive them, as Karl Rove has lately exploited to the great benefit of a few wealthy folks. On the other side of the coin we have Al Gore and his voodoo-mathematical hockey stick, a fearmonger's tactic straight from the Ralph Nader playbook.

In my ever-so humble opinion: if the best tactic a movement can come up with is appealing to people's fears, they've already lost whatever it is they're trying to save.

The term "dead zone" gets the attention faster than "hypoxic region", plus it is natural for there to be some hypoxia especially in regions that are overnitrated... just not to the degrees that are being detected. I'm more concerned about the cumulative effect this could have on the local ecology and the food webs.

I have faith that Earth will rebound (almost always does) but as to when is unknown. But if human activities are accelerating or exacerbating them, human actions will be needed to decelerate them.

So, if my blood pressure is 130/90 and the doctor says I should modify my lifestyle, I'm right to say he is alarmist and let it go to say 180/110? ;)

That's one take on the 405 hypoxic regions...