Achieving water quality goals for the Gulf of Mexico may take decades, according to findings by researchers at the University of Waterloo.
The results, which appear in Science, suggest that policy goals for reducing the size of the northern Gulf of Mexico’s dead zone may be unrealistic, and that major changes in agricultural and river management practices may be necessary to achieve the desired improvements in water quality.
Achieving water quality goals for the Gulf of Mexico may take decades, according to findings by researchers at the University of Waterloo.
The results, which appear in Science, suggest that policy goals for reducing the size of the northern Gulf of Mexico’s dead zone may be unrealistic, and that major changes in agricultural and river management practices may be necessary to achieve the desired improvements in water quality.
The transport of large quantities of nitrogen from rivers and streams across the North American corn belt has been linked to the development of a large dead zone in the northern Gulf of Mexico, where massive algal blooms lead to oxygen depletion, making it difficult for marine life to survive.
“Despite the investment of large amounts of money in recent years to improve water quality, the area of last year’s dead zone was more than 22,000 km2—about the size of the state of New Jersey,” said Kimberly Van Meter, lead author of the paper and a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Waterloo.
Read more at University of Waterloo
Image: Sediment-laden water pours into the northern Gulf of Mexico from the Atchafalaya River in this photo-like image, taken by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer on the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Aqua satellite. CREDIT: NASA
