Despite promises, dead zone growing

A decade ago, a team of government experts and environmental researchers banded together to tackle an alarming -- and growing -- disturbance in the Gulf of Mexico.

A lifeless, oxygen-depleted band of ocean water stretching from the mouth of the Mississippi River to the Texas border had grown to more than 6,000 square miles that summer, larger than the state of Connecticut.

Four years later, their research on the Gulf "dead zone" led to an agreement among nine states, numerous federal agencies and two American Indian tribes to significantly reduce the size by 2015.

Solving the problem is a vast undertaking. Fertilizer runoff and wastewater from farms and towns upstream in the nation's heartland pour billions of pounds of excess nutrients into the Mississippi, and eventually the Gulf, each year, sparking unnatural algae blooms that choke off the oxygen supply vital for marine life.

With diffuse streams and rivulets of the Mississippi draining more than 40 percent of the continental United States, pinpointing and halting the source of the dead zone has eluded policymakers over the years. And targeted federal financing to address the problem has never materialized.

Now at the halfway mark for the 2015 goal, the dead zone is still growing -- reaching nearly 8,000 square miles this year -- one of the largest recorded. The federal and state task force recently released an update to the reduction plan, calling for states along the Mississippi River to enact strict water quality standards and encouraging farmers to limit fertilizers on land near streams.

But the new action plan states the 2015 goal is unlikely to be met, and record high corn prices from the ethanol boom are bringing more farmland on line. Without more political will from all states, including Louisiana, many researchers say the dead zone problem will persist long into the future, at the peril of the Gulf's ecosystem.

"These are things we all were well aware of in 2000 and 2001. There's nothing particularly new in what they're proposing," said Don Scavia, a professor of natural resources and environment at the University of Michigan who led one of the first federal studies of the dead zone in 2000. "We're now starting to find impacts on the shrimp catch. . . . We're at the point where it may be hard to recover, because the ecosystem has changed so much."

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