Dead Zone in Global Oceans Growing

About ten years ago, researchers found that there was a 70 mile dead zone where the Mississippi River empties into the Gulf of Mexico south of New Orleans. At the same time, they found that the delta that helped protect New Orleans from a Katrina level hurricane was also dying. The Mississippi drains 2/3s of the fresh water in the USA. Think about it and vote for someone who can say more than "Drill, Baby Drill and Drill Now!"

clipped from uk.reuters.com OSLO, Sept 29 (Reuters) - The number of polluted "dead zones" in the world's oceans is rising fast and coastal fish stocks are more vulnerable to collapse than previously feared, scientists said on Monday. The spread of "dead zones" -- areas of oxygen-starved water -- "is emerging as a major threat to coastal ecosystems globally," the scientists wrote in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Such zones are found from the Gulf of Mexico to the Baltic Sea in areas where algae bloom and suck oxygen from the water, feeding on fertilisers washed from fields, sewage, animal wastes and pollutants from the burning of fossil fuels.