It's not just a book by Stephen King, it's an oxygen-starved
area in the ocean where nothing can live. Scientists say
there are more of these being created than ever before.
Fishermen in Martha's Vineyard are discovering "Sea Balls"
that have washed on shore. And that island paradise you
dream of visiting? Don't look too closely.
Some of the ocean's "dead zones" are tiny, while others are
vast. They're caused by the nitrogen in fertilizer washing into
the sea. "Humankind is engaged in a gigantic, global,
experiment as a result of the inefficient and often over-use of
fertilizers, the discharge of untreated sewage and the ever
rising emissions from vehicles and factories," said the UN's
Klaus Toepfer. "The nitrogen and phosphorous from these
sources are being discharged into rivers and the coastal
environment or being deposited from the atmosphere,
triggering these alarming and sometimes irreversible effects."
Nitrogen fertilizer stimulates the growth of too much algae.
When the algae sinks to the bottom of the ocean, it sucks up
all the available oxygen, leaving none for other plants or fish,
which then die. Nitrogen also gets into the ocean from fossil
fuels.
Large dead zones are found in the Gulf of Mexico, the
Chesapeake Bay, the Baltic and Black seas, and parts of the
Adriatic, as well as off South America, Japan, China, Australia
and New Zealand. Some of them are permanent, while others
appear and disappear.
Hans Greimel writes that from a satellite, many
Island "paradises" look like trash dumps stuck in the middle of
the ocean. Small island countries in Caribbean and the Pacific
Ocean often have no place to dump their trash, so they heap
it in large piles that are getting so big they can be seen from
space. The outline of the Pacific island of Nauru appears blue-
green in aerial photos, from the mounds of discarded beer
cans in the shallow water offshore.
In the Caribbean, about 90% of sewage is discharged
untreated into the ocean, and in the Pacific it?s 98%. About
one in 20 ocean swimmers worldwide become ill because of
this. And this is another form of pollution that creates dead
zones.
C.K. Wolfson writes in the Vineyard Gazette about the
baseball-sized spheres that have started washing up on
Martha's Vineyard beaches. The locals call them "sea balls."
They were first seen about 35 years ago. They're an intricate
composition of ocean debris, such as seaweed, twigs, roots
and eroded beach and sea grasses, that weave themselves
together in the ocean. They're lighter in weight than tennis
balls and can be round or oblong. They're like tumbleweeds,
except that sea balls are formed in the ocean. The question
that needs to be answered is: why are they only found in
Martha's Vineyard?
To see a sea ball,
click here.
Our oceans aren't just filled with trash, they also contain
deep mysteries that have not yet been solved.
To learn more, click here and
here.
