Sometimes some guys who think they are smarter can tell us to screw ourselves. Here's how we do just that. "If we screw up the energy flow within our systems we could end up with no crabs, no shrimp, no fish. That is where these dead zones are heading unless we stop their growth," said Robert Diaz,co-author of the research in the journal Science. So we screw ourselves.
Like a chronic disease wasting a body, ocean "dead zones" with too little oxygen for marine life are spreading around the globe. The experts counted 405 dead zones in 2007 — a third more than their 1995 survey. The problem is growing to a magnittude that is starting to affect the resources that we pull out from the sea to feed ourselves.
Fertilizers, fuel, sewage blamed
Pollution-fed algae, which deprive other living marine life of oxygen, is the cause of most of the world's dead zones. Scientists mainly blame fertilizer and other farm runoff, sewage and fossil-fuel burning. Areas where there are prawn culture ponds and salmon farming cages have become hypoxic, too.
Rivers in South America that were once thought to be too large to have the same problems as the Mississippi River, now have their estuaries and coastal areas suffering the same malady.
This is a global problem and it has severe consequences for ecosystems. The trend could lead to global food problem. Now that's stimulating.
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