Inside Report for Oct. 10, 2008

• By AMY WOLD
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: Oct 10, 2008 - Page: 7B - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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The “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico this summer tied with the second largest in size since measurements started back in 1985.

Despite the multi-regional planning through the Mississippi River/Gulf of Mexico Watershed Nutrient Task Force since 1997, the dead zone keeps growing.

The task force — made up of federal and state officials and scientists — has been working to develop plans and voluntary efforts to help reduce the causes of the dead zone.

Hypoxia — commonly referred to as the dead zone — forms every summer in the Gulf of Mexico. The dead zone is an area of low oxygen of 2 parts per million or less of dissolved oxygen in the water — a level too low for many marine creatures to survive.

This dead zone is formed when nutrients from farm or urban runoff flow down the Mississippi River into the Gulf of Mexico. These nutrients feed microscopic organisms that use up oxygen when they die and decompose on the water bottom.

During summer months, this low-oxygen bottom layer of water doesn’t get mixed with the more oxygen-rich upper layer of water.

This summer, longtime hypoxia surveyor Nancy Rabalais and other scientists found that the dead zone measured 8,000 square miles from July 21 through July 27. That’s the second-largest area measured since the annual dead zone surveys started in 1985.

The largest dead zone size was measured in 2002, when the dead zone measured 8,400 square miles.

The Mississippi River/Gulf of Mexico Watershed Nutrient Task Force has set a goal to reduce the dead zone to 1,930 square miles by 2015 through voluntary efforts by states and local governments and through conservation programs.

Earlier this year, the task force released an outline of suggestions that states and regions can take — such as developing methods to reduce nutrient loads to waterways.

This Gulf Hypoxia Action Plan 2008 can be found online at http://www.epa.gov/msbasin.

Benjamin Grumbles, assistant administrator for water at EPA and chairman of the task force that wrote the action plan, said one of the challenges to reducing the amount of nutrients coming down the Mississippi River is that much of that pollution comes from “non-point” sources.

Unlike “point sources” of pollution, such as waste water discharged from a pipe, non-point sources include wide areas, such as a farmer’s field, pasture land or an urban parking lot.