The forecast for this year’s dead zone off the Louisiana coast is about the size of Connecticut. The lead scientist tracking the annual formation says that is much too big.
Dr. Nancy Rabalais is director of the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium. She says data shows the dead zone for this year could be as large as 6,800 square miles. It remains the second-largest man-made dead zone on earth. The Baltic Sea area is the biggest.
Rabalais says nutrients from farming along the Mississippi River are to blame.
“Why the concentration is so high is not quite clear because we had a lot of flooding early in the year,” she said. “It’s possible that a lot of the what I would call legacy nutrients – nitrates – are still on the land and these big pulses of water are bringing much, more into the river.”
The dead zone is an area with too little oxygen to keep sea creatures alive. Rabalais says the goal is an average of 2,000 square miles – the largest prediction is 3 ½ times larger.
