Ocean Dead Zones May Be Worse Than Thought

Wired:

Oxygen-starved ocean dead zones may be more widespread than thought.

Spanish researchers found that many species die off at oxygen levels well above what is now considered uninhabitable. The new study suggests that the extent of dead zones in coastal areas that support fishing industries is greater than previously known.

Read the whole story: Wired

Comments

[johnnyjust]

Or they may be better than thought.

[Gasparilla]

And you base that on what?

[research]

So the GOP tribe doubts all science. You think the universe was created 6000 years ago.

Reality has a Liberal Bias.

[NL207]

No. Conservatives simply doubt junk science, and this AGW alarmist stuff is exactly that Junk Science. Every one of these catastrophic global warming scenarios presented as if these things were something that could actually happen within the next century or even several centuries are pure speculatoin with no basis in any kind of real science.

It gets even better. Current empirical data suggest that the IPCC's minimum warming case is what is actually happening at present. If these trends continue, that yields a 1 degree C temerature increase over the next century, not 2, 3, 5 or 10 as some alarmists claim. It means a 12-18" sea level increase, not 1, 2, 3 or 7 meters as some alarmists claim.
http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/prometheus/archives/climate_change/001319verification_of_ipcc.html

[Gasparilla]

The more our population grows, the harder this problem will be to fix. The more immigration we keep encouraging, the more our population will grow.

[Lupin77]

What is interesting about this photo showing dead sounds off of the southern states is that off shore there are 4,000 off shore drilling rigs there. Don't think the dead zones and drilling rigs are a coincidence.

[Exusian]

Although spills from oil and gas production don't help, as the article states the oxygen-starved (hypoxic) red zones in the photo are due to the decomposition of algal blooms that feed on agricultural fertilizer run-off.

[NL207]

More propaganda. The peer-reviewed science cited by the "WIRED" blogsite does not support all the claims made in the Wired posting. This is the abstract of the linked PNAS paper:
"Hypoxia is a mounting problem affecting the world's coastal waters, with severe consequences for marine life, including death and catastrophic changes. Hypoxia is forecast to increase owing to the combined effects of the continued spread of coastal eutrophication and global warming. A broad comparative analysis across a range of contrasting marine benthic organisms showed that hypoxia thresholds vary greatly across marine benthic organisms and that the conventional definition of 2 mg O2/liter to designate waters as hypoxic is below the empirical sublethal and lethal O2 thresholds for half of the species tested. These results imply that the number and area of coastal ecosystems affected by hypoxia and the future extent of hypoxia impacts on marine life have been generally underestimated. "

Notice it makes no claims correlating afgricultural run-off, oil spills, or any other factors either natural or athropogenic to the development of hypoxic areas in the oceans. It blames increased hypoxia on eutrophication - an increase in nutrients in the water- and global warming, clearly references to other works not cited by "Wired". This paper is itself about the relative susceptibility thresholds of different kinds of marine organisms to hypoxia, not about the causes and formation of oceanic hypoxia zones.

"Wired" article is, at best, incomplete without references to these implied other works.