Politics' Involvement with Dead Zones

The algae bloom in Lake Erie in 2011 that according to the NOAA was the worst in decades.

There are many ways in which politics is involved with dead zones. Dead zones are considered an environmental issue and issues like this are brought up to certain politicians whom are expected to take action to try and solve them. Lake Erie is one of the many areas with this problem. In January of 2015, there was an article published on the reducing phosphorus levels in the lake. Fertilizer runoff was labeled as one of the contributors but there were others that were even more dramatic such as drought and low flows from tributaries and streams.

Because of the reducing phosphorus levels and other findings, it was suggested that policymakers have been working on plans in order to combat the dead zones in Lake Erie. Anna Michalak was the one who led this study and also mentioned that they should look at the meteorological changes as well as an agricultural management practice. What she is saying is that there is only so much people can control with this problem. There are many potential causes to dead zones, but we cannot control every single one of them. The types of causes that we can control are ones that include the runoff and what is coming from the runoff into bodies of water such as Lake Erie. Ones that are not in our control are natural causes such as increasing water temperature from climate change.

Raj Bejankiwar of the International Joint Commission, a U.S. - Canadian Agency, said, “Only a few things are in our control, and how much phosphorus comes into the lake is one of them.” This Agency made a move in 2014 that called for cutting phosphorus runoff by nearly half over three to six years. This was an important move since Lake Erie produces the fish that people eat most. If these dead zones overtake the fish, then there will be no more fish or other types of seafood for people to eat. That is a big step in the right direction and more calls like this need to be made for larger dead zones such as the Baltic Sea and the Gulf of Mexico. 

Flesher, John. (2015). Lake Erie 'Dead Zones' Influenced by Weather, Scientists Report. HuffPost. Retrieved on May 1, 2015 at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/01/06/lake-erie-dead-zones_n_6424598.html 

Peer Review of Dead Zones

When I was looking at peer reviewed articles for my papers this year, there were several ones about dead zones. I was surprised to see that there were not as many as I thought there would be. Many of them were from before 2005 so research on dead zones has been looked at for numerous amounts of years. The peer reviewed article I chose to write about is by Andrew H. Altieri and Keryn B. Gedan and is called Climate Change and Dead Zones. It was published in 2015 and actually the only article I saw that was published in the current year. This article is one of the few I found that was about how climate change is a factor contributing to dead zones. The majority of the ones I found focused more on what we do such as fossil fuels and the nitrates and phosphates that accumulate due to over fertilization from farms.

One point that Alteiri and Gedan make in this article is that 94% of dead zones are located in regions that will have a 2° C temperature increase by the end of the century. They have also found evidence that climate variables such as temperature, ocean acidification, and precipitation will affect dead zones and that each of these factors including others have the ability to act on the oxygen availability along with the ecological responses to hypoxia. This statement suggests that these factors work together to exacerbate dead zones along with the obvious causes such as eutrophication.

One thing I thought was really interesting in this article was a chart that shows the physical and biological effects and their specified climate drivers (you can see it by going to the actual article). For example, one of the climate drivers was sea level rise and the physical effect was stratification, nutrient loading, and the volume of hypoxic water. For the biological effects, it included wetland filtration of nutrients. These effects are the related effects of dead zones and helps drive their point mentioned earlier that the climate variables all contribute in some way to dad zones.

They also showed a model on the temperature effects on hypoxia impacts. On one side it showed the drivers such as nutrients and microbial decomposition and their effects with higher temperatures. On the other side it showed the responses such as physiological stress and tolerance. What helped the most was for each driver and response it had an explanation of how it is affected with higher temperatures and I think it was an important piece of information to put in the article.

This article really pinpoints the natural causes of dead zones and makes the general public aware of their effects on dead zones. The pictures and diagrams really helped, even for me being a biology major.

Altieri, A. H. and Gedan, K. B. (2015). Climate change and dead zones. Global Change Biology,

            21: 1395–1406. doi: 10.1111/gcb.12754. 

Pictures received from http://www.vims.edu/research/topics/_images/do_climate_change.jpg and 

https://img.washingtonpost.com/rf/image_1484w/2010-2019/WashingtonPost/2014/11/10/Health-Environment-Science/Graphics/w-DeadZones.jpg?uuid=1YyxRmiJEeS6_WWYGSpEjQ