Number of Ocean 'Dead Zones' Doubling Every Decade

By Joel Achenbach
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, August 14, 2008; 2:12 PM

In the latest sign of trouble in the planet's chemistry, the number of oxygen-starved "dead zones" in coastal waters around the world has roughly doubled every decade since the 1960s, killing fish, crustaceans and massive amounts of marine life at the base of the food chain, according to a study released today.

"These zones are popping up all over," said Robert Diaz, a professor at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science who led of the study published online by the journal Science.

Diaz and co-author Rutger Rosenberg of the University of Gothenburg in Sweden counted more than 400 dead zones globally, ranging from massive ones in the Baltic Sea and the Gulf of Mexico to small ones that episodically appear in river estuaries. The amount of "biomass" that is missing because of low oxygen levels in the Chesapeake Bay would be enough to feed half the commercial crab harvest for a year, Diaz estimated.

Low oxygen, known as hypoxia, is a significant measure of the downstream effect of chemical fertilizers used in agriculture. Air pollution is another factor. The nitrogen from the fertilizer or pollution feeds the growth of algae in coastal waters, particularly during summer. The algae eventually dies and sinks to the bottom, where the organic matter decays in a process that robs the bottom waters of oxygen.

Hypoxia has been seen for decades in such places as the Chesapeake Bay, Lake Erie, the Gulf of Mexico and Long Island Sound, but Diaz's survey has found new zones in the Florida Keys, Puget Sound and tidal creeks in the Carolinas.

more:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/14/AR2008081401910.html

destruction is? You get one guess.

And it ISN'T pretty.

So what we will have, eventually, is a situation where people starve/fight each other until the population goes down. Then the pollution will go down and the situation will reverse itself. And you are right, it won't be pretty.

The rich have all the weapons and the best crop land. Trust me, if we do get to the point where there isn't enough food, the third world will just starve to death. No pretty and not just, but that's the way it will go down.

Of course something else will be blamed, but when people are hungry fighting begins.

And it will be far worse when China starts to get hit by this.

The fighting in Somalia, Sudan, Congo, and Palestine exist because the developed world continues to provide its surplus food to those populations. In the event of real food scarcity, the developed world would keep the food for itself and those populations wouldn't last a week. You can't fight if you have nothing to eat.

You have a good point about China though. They are fairly poor but have scary weapons.