Cause of dead zone in Gulf: Tile drainage directly related to nitrate loss

ScienceDaily (Sep. 27, 2010) — Tile drainage in the Mississippi Basin is one of the great advances of the 19th and 20th centuries, allowing highly productive agriculture in what was once land too wet to farm. In fact, installation of new tile systems continues every year, because it leads to increased crop yields. But a […]

Hundreds of fish, thousands of shrimp dead in Hood Canal

By Christopher Dunagan, Kitsap SunSeptember 21, 2010 at 10:45 a.m. HOODSPORT — The massive fish kill that many researchers warned about Monday may have begun early this morning, as many hundreds of dead fish and thousands of shrimp washed up on Hood Canal beaches, officials say. “We have hypoxic (low oxygen) conditions all the way […]

Chesapeake Bay progress uneven, study shows

Data suggest sewage upgrades working, farm runoff controls aren’t By Timothy B. Wheeler, The Baltimore Sun September 15, 2010 A new study shows some Chesapeake Bay rivers have gotten cleaner over the past three decades, while others are getting worse. The analysis, released Wednesday by the U.S. Geological Survey, suggests costly upgrades of sewage plants […]

Natural gas from ruptured Gulf well remained trapped in deep waters

By PAUL VOOSEN of GreenwireSeptember 17, 2010 Perhaps it should have been called the Gulf of Mexico gas spill. A vast majority of the natural gas that billowed out of BP PLC’s failed well in the Gulf this summer did not escape to the surface and atmosphere. Instead, the gas — including its main component, […]

Massive fish kills in bayous hit by BP oil spill

By Bob Warren, The Times-PicayuneMonday, September 13, 2010, 3:42 PM Plaquemines Parish officials have asked state wildlife officials to investigate what they said is a massive fish kill at Bayou Chaland on the west side of the Mississippi River late Friday. Photographs the parish distributed of the area shows an enormous amount of dead fish […]

Graph of the Day: Dead Zones in Chesapeake Bay, 2005

Climate change is likely to expand and intensify “dead zones,” areas where bottom water is depleted of dissolved oxygen because of nitrogen pollution, threatening living things. More spring runoff and warmer coastal waters will increase the seasonal reduction in oxygen resulting from excess nitrogen from agriculture. Coastal dead zones in places such as the northern […]

Gulf oxygen levels are lower, but not deadly, in wake of spill, researchers report

By Mark Schleifstein, The Times-PicayuneWednesday, September 08, 2010, 6:00 AM The biodegradation of oil in plumes within 60 miles of the failed BP Macondo oil well have caused levels of dissolved oxygen in deep water of the Gulf of Mexico to drop by as much as 20 percent, but no oxygen-void dead zones have been […]

Invasive mollusk disrupting base of Lake Michigan ecosystem — ‘We have a system that’s crashing’

  By Marcia GoodrichSeptember 7, 2010 12:23 PM September 2, 2010 — Something has been eating Charlie Kerfoot’s doughnut, and all fingers point to a European mollusk about the size of a fat lima bean. No one knew about the doughnut in southern Lake Michigan, much less the mollusk, until Michigan Technological University biologist W. […]

Dead zones increased dramatically in US waters over the past 50 years

By Mike Lee, UNION-TRIBUNEFriday, September 3, 2010 at 10:03 a.m. Dead zones increased dramatically in U.S. waters over the past 50 years, threatening ecosystems and fisheries nationwide, according to a sweeping report Friday by the federal Office of Science and Technology Policy. The multiagency assessment said that incidents of hypoxia — a condition in which […]

Previously unknown microbe ate BP oil deep-water plume

By Deborah Zabarenko, Environment CorrespondentTue Aug 24, 2010 5:25pm EDT WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A Manhattan-sized plume of oil spewed deep into the Gulf of Mexico by BP’s broken Macondo well has been consumed by a newly discovered fast-eating species of microbes, scientists reported on Tuesday.   The micro-organisms were apparently stimulated by the massive oil spill […]

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