It's 7,000 square miles of ocean more lifeless than the fiercest desert. The only things oceanographers have been able to find alive in this zone are other oceanographers. What they do find are drifting remains and the tumbleweed skeletons of any creature unlucky enough to have entered the dead zone. Anything that can't find its way out quickly perishes. Scientists think agricultural pollution churning out of the mighty Mississippi into the Gulf of Mexico is causing the dead zone.
Rain flushes thousands of tons of nitrogen from thousands of acres of farmland into the Mississippi.
These algae blooms eventually settle to the ocean floor and die. It is the bacteria consuming the dead algae that actually sucks the oxygen and the life out of the ocean. Sandra LaBlanc is not the kind of person who'd say I told you so, and even if she were she'd probably be too depressed to in this case. But for years LaBlanc and the National Catholic Rural Life Conference , where she works as communications director, have been warning about the varied threats of industrial agriculture. Groundwater poisoning is another threat as is whatever contribution manure runoff is making to the hypoxia fields growing in coastal waters.