For decades, an oxygen-depleted dead zone that is harmful to sea life has appeared in the Gulf of Mexico in a region off the coasts of Louisiana and Texas. This year, it’s larger than average, federal scientists announced in a report Thursday.
This year, the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico entered into the top third of largest dead zones in records that go back 38 years, (…)
The 2024 zone in the Gulf is about 6,705 square miles, which is an area roughly the size of New Jersey.
The latest measurement is about 1,000 square miles larger than NOAA’s prediction in June, calculated using discharge from the Mississippi River and nutrient runoff data from the U.S. Geological Survey.
I remember the DVD commentary on the 2004 Spongebob movie talking about this. It’s bad, but it’s not new.
Going by the NOAA’s data, it isn’t even getting worse, and the five year rolling average has decreased steadily since 1995. It’s inevitable that some years will be above average with that amount of variance.
A plan to slowly decrease it is in operation, the cause and consequences are known and accounted for. As far as climate disasters go, this one’s pretty tame.