The Gulf of Mexico Is About to Experience a "Dead Zone" the Size of Connecticut
http://m.motherjones.com/environment/2016/06/gulf-mexico-braces-monsterous-dead-zoneThe Gulf of Mexico Is About to Experience a "Dead Zone" the Size of Connecticut
Midwestern farm fertilizer runnoff is expected to create a massive algae bloom and a biological desert to follow it.
TOM PHILPOTT JUN. 17, 2016 6:00 AM
A NOAA vizualization of where the nitrogen comes from that fuels the annual dead zone. NOAA
The Gulf of Mexico teems with biodiversity and contains some of the globe's most productive fisheries. Yet starting in the early 1970s, large swaths of the Gulf began to experience annual dead zones in the late summer and early fall. This year's will likely be nearly a third larger than normal, about the size of Connecticut, according to a recent report from the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium and Louisiana State University.
This year's dead zone will likely be nearly a third larger than normal.
The problem is tied to industrial-scale meat production. To churn out huge amounts chicken, beef, and pork, the meat industry relies on corn as cheap feed. The US grows about a third of the globe's corn, the great bulk of it in the Midwest, on land that drains into the Mississippi River. Every year, fertilizer runoff from Midwestern farms leaches into the Mississippi and makes its way to the Gulf of Mexico.
Intended to feed the nation's vast corn crop, this renegade nitrogen instead feeds vast aquatic algae blooms in the early summer. When the algae blooms die and decay, they tie up oxygen from the water underneath. As a result, as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Organization puts it, "habitats that would normally be teeming with life become, essentially, biological deserts."
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The corn that we feed livestock, which they typically wouldn't eat in nature, could feed the world's hungry masses ... instead of being force-fed to animals which then get eaten by humans.
Just skip it and eat the damn corn, and help save the environment, reduce animal suffering and greenhouse gases. Another win-win.
But much more radical than oceanic dead zones, global warming and bypass surgery ... by far. 
This is what it looked like two years ago. It's going to be WAY BIGGER this year.
One leads to the other.
On the other hand, you might want to look into organic, grass-fed beef, raised via a system which brings health to the land.
Cattle naturally feed on grasses, not on GMO-glyphosate-pesticide-mineral fertilized corn - which brings death to the land and also the Gulf of Mexico.
Call it Super Scuzz, Inc.
The farmers are not so much to blame, but rather the conglomeratess which devise these Chemical Systems that fertilize vast swaths of DEATH itself
Same corporate conglomerates, same idiotic mechanical thinking, still using the same fertilizers on GMO corn for feed and biofuels, still creating EVEN MORE MASSIVE DEAD ZONES.
Commercial synthetic fertilizers for GMO crops and GMO corn feedlots are the driving wheel of this massive tragic clusterwank, but GMOs are a huge part of the problem and must bear a share of the blame. GMOs and their corporate overlords keep the Death Cycle rolling.
