Pond Boss Forums GENERAL QUESTIONS Pond Boss Gulf Dead Zone

Scary stuff if you think about it. I saw an article where the hypoxic waters off the gulf coast are well over 5k square miles in size this year!

Do they know what the cause is? Does it have anything to know with the cesspool the Mississippi has become with it bringing into the Gulf everything but the kitchen sink in herbicides, pesticides, industrial chemicals, silt, and sewage?

And now along with that we have oil. What a shame.

That's what caused the dead zones in the Chesapeake Bay. The watershed was so vast that the nitrogen and phosphate buildup overwhelmed portions of the Northern and Central tributaries, which were already running a fine line with DO content.

I don't see why the same exact physical and biochemical process wouldn't occur with the Gulf and the Miss. Yes the volume of water is a million times larger than the Bay, but the Miss goes through every frigging agriculture state in the country. It's scary what we can do too the earth, but it's truly amazing how well it heals itself. Case in point Lake Erie now versus 30 years ago (Zebra mussels or no zebra mussels there's no comparison).

Yes I remember when Lake Erie was all but dead. That is a success story. Now all we need to do is stop running raw sewage and industrial waste into our rivers when municipal sewage treatment plants get overwhelmed with storm drains. We can spend a trillion dollars nation building but we can't fix that?

One thing saltwater does not have going for it is it can't hold as much dissolved oxygen as freshwater.

I believe the water treatment plants and ag runoff combined with muni runoff are one of the main culprits of the decimation of my beloved Sacramneto River estuary, the largest on the Left coast. But with anything lese, it is multiple causation. Of many of the native species, we have less than 1% of what existed 30 years ago. They spray paint do not dump toxics with a outline of a fish in front of our storm drains. I'm sure that stops everyone.

I showed photos of a beaver pond that was there for probably hundreds of years. Right after they put a new subdivision in and tied off all of the drainage to one outlet pouring in, the beavers abandoned it and moved less than 100 yards upstream. And this is a protected Nature reserve. Everybody has thier socially required nice green lawns though. Urban sprawl and nature rarely coexist in harmony. Politicians play the blame game and point fingers and make mean faces while getting reelected by funds from the same environmental rapists. Hey the bright side is they opened up Pacific Salmon fishing for a week or two this year, yippeeee!!!!