The Missing Greenhouse Gas - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 79

When conditions are right, the eutrophication in the Gulf of Mexico can grow to
Frankensteinian proportions. In 2002, a record algae bloom created a dead zone of
8,500 square miles , which is slightly larger than the state of Massachusetts. In 2008, the
dead zone was slightly smaller, thanks to the water-mixing effects of Hurricane Dolly.
In 2010, the BP oil spill from the sinking of the Deepwater Horizon caused further en-
vironmental destruction.
The Gulf's dead zone depletes about 212,000 metric tons of biomass, which serves
as food for brown shrimp. Robert Diaz , a marine biologist at the College of William
& Mary, estimates that this is enough to feed 75 percent of the brown shrimp usually
caught in a season. “If there was no hypoxia and there was that much more food, don't
you think the shrimp and crabs would be happier?” he said. “They would certainly be
fatter.” The Gulf's shrimp population has plummeted, causing the Louisiana fishing in-
dustry, the nation's second largest, to crash.
QUEEN OF THE DEAD ZONE
In the first decade of the twenty-first century, a combination of vastly increased corn
and soybean production in the Mississippi watershed—much of which is slated for what
Hirsch deems “the great ethanol fuel experiment, a very misguided experiment in my
view”—and terrible flooding in the Midwest, which washed many pollutants into the
system, worried experts. Some fear that the Gulf's dead zone could expand to as much
as ten thousand square miles.
Nancy Rabalais , executive director of the Louisiana Universities Marine Consorti-
um, described it this way: “Think of a giant corridor from Des Moines to Chicago, and
you [put] a great big piece of Saran wrap over all that area and sucked all the oxygen
out. You would have a big problem.”
Rabalais, known as the Queen of the Dead Zone, was the first to map the Gulf of
Mexico's hypoxia, in 1985. Every summer she sets out into the Gulf aboard the research
vessel Pelicanto chart the spread of algae.
One of the biggest challenges to denitrification is the politics of agriculture in the
United States, she says. The Mississippi Basin encompasses many communities, each
with its own agenda and set of conditions; without much federal leadership on the issue,
it is difficult to build consensus, fund programs, and turn ideas into action. “Des Moines
is willing to filter their drinking water to an extra degree just to be able to flood their
water supply with more-than-normal levels of fertilizer,” Rabalais said. “Look, you just
can't have all these states and all these communities knowingly overfertilizing their land
because they want a bumper crop every year. That's just all kinds of bad.”