Healing low-oxygen aquatic “dead zones” will be trickier than previously imagined, according to scientists speaking at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. That’s because the low oxygen levels that make it impossible for most organisms to survive also kill a bacteria crucial to removing nitrogen from the water.
In recent years there have been extensive efforts to reduce nitrogen and phosphorus loads in the Chesapeake Bay, the Gulf of Mexico, and other areas with dead zones, but those efforts have not yielded the expected results. “We’ve been working for 20 years to breathe life into these dead zones, but we’ve found it much harder than we thought,” says Donald F. Boesch, president of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. “Even when the nutrient loads are reduced, the hypoxia is generally not recovering with the rapidity we assumed it might.
News brief originally published Winter 2010.
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