Dayle's Op-Ed essay

Dayle Walters
03/07/12
Writ 101
First Draft
                                                                Dead...Zone

    3,300 square miles. Earth’s crust is 197 million square miles, so 3,300 is 1.6% of the Earth’s surface. That may not seem like much, but what can fit into 3,300 square miles? Rhode Island is 1214 square miles and Missoula fits into a mere 23 square miles. 3,300 is a massive amount of space and it’s a dead zone.

    When you look at pictures of the dead zone from space it looks like thin yellow pieces of fat that line some of our coasts. A dead zone is very similar to the extra fat on our bodies, a place where excess nutrients wind up and are never used. A dead zone is comprised of everything from yard waste to agricultural fertilizers. One of the biggest dead zones is in the Gulf of Mexico. It is the second largest dead zone in the world, paled only in comparison to the one in the Baltic Sea, which is the size of Germany. The Gulf of Mexico’s dead zone gets all of its extra nutrients from the Mississippi river. The reason for the extravagant name, The Dead Zone, is that nothing can live there.  The area becomes hypoxic. “Hypoxia occurs when oxygen levels in seawater drop to dangerously low levels, and severe hypoxia can potentially result in the death fish and harm to marine life, thereby creating a ‘dead zone’ of life in that particular area.” (1) This happens when fresh water is lighter than salt water, because of which all the extra nutrients move down while no oxygen can get to the salt water.
 
  The problem stems from the Mississippi river. “The Mississippi is the largest river in the United States, draining 40 percent of the land area of the country. It also accounts for almost 90 percent of the freshwater runoff into the Gulf of Mexico.” (1) Many problems together cause the Mississippi’s run off to become polluted, but one of the major components is agricultural techniques.

  With such a mass amount of space that has become inhabitable by wild life I am surprised that so little has been done to stop this problem that we as a society are causing.  There are so many things that we could be doing that start off time intensive and expensive but in the long run these certain methods will become less intrusive to the environment and cheaper to the businesses involved.