Mon May 17, 2010 4:59 PM EDT By The Rachel Maddow Show (Times-Picayune graphic) Years before the Deepwater Horizon disaster, before the underwater volcano of oil threatened to create a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, scientists recognized another dead zone in the Gulf. The New Orleans Times-Picayune won a Pulitzer in 1997 for documenting the devastation around the mouth of the Mississippi River. The 7,000-square-mile dead zone was caused by algae blooms, feeding on agricultural and sewer runoff, that deplete the oxygen in the water. http://www.pulitzer.org/archives/6010 Ten years later, the Times-Picayune found this dead zone was still growing: “You reach a point where you've shifted the ecosystem to a completely different domain, and the recovery from that may be impossible,” said Don Scavia, a professor of natural resources and environment at the University of Michigan and former National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientist who led one of the first federal studies on the dead zone in 2000. “There will be a time where the critters that typically occupy the sediment in those areas can no longer recover.” added by: EthicalVegan
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