Dead zone: Encyclopedia II - Dead zone - Locations of dead zones

Dead zone - Locations of dead zones

In the 1970s, marine dead zones were first noted in areas where intensive economic use stimulated "first-world" scientific scrutiny: in the U.S. East Coast's Chesapeake Bay, in Scandinavia's strait called the Kattegat, which is the mouth of the Baltic Sea and in other important Baltic Sea fishing grounds, in the Black Sea, (which may have been anoxic in its deepest levels for millennia, however) and in the northern Adriatic.

Currently the most notorious dead zone is a 20,000 square kilometer region in the Gulf of Mexico, where the Mississippi River dumps high-nutrient runoff from its vast drainage basin, which includes the heart of U.S. agribusiness, the Midwest, affecting important shrimp fishing grounds.

Other marine dead zones have appeared in coastal waters of South America, China, Japan, southeast Australia, and even in the waters of New Zealand, which have a reputation for being some of the planet's most pristine near-coastal marine environments.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Locations of dead zones", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki