Dustbowl to Dead Zone?

Dustbowl to Dead Zone?

The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency is developing guidelines to reduce fertilizer runoff into the Mississippi River watershed. Why? It promotes algae growth and creates low-oxygen “dead zones” that can’t support marine life. A dead zone off the mouth of the Mississippi in the Gulf of Mexico is the size of Connecticut. Upstream states want to shrink it by limiting runoff. 

Less than a century ago Dorothea Lange documented migrant workers escaping another man-made ecological disaster, the Dust Bowl. How are today’s Gulf State residents affected by the dead zone? 

—Alex Bortolot, Content Strategist, September 26

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Image: LUMCON (Rabalais) 

Source: Matt Sepic and Elizabeth Dunbar, “Mississippi River’s 1926 dead zone holds lessons for Gulf of Mexico today,” Minnesota Public Radio, 9/25/2013