Nsikan Akpan / PBS NewsHour 11 June 2019 April showers might mean May flowers, but this year’s May showers could bring a giant choking swarm of death to wildlife in the Gulf of Mexico. On Monday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released its annual Gulf forecast for this summer’s “dead zone” — a pocket of [...]

Travis Lux / WWNO New Orleans, Public Radio 10 June 2019 The dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico is predicted to be the second biggest in history, according to a new forecast from the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium (LUMCON). The dead zone is mostly caused by agricultural run-off from the Mississippi River; nutrients from fertilizers [...]

Nina Golgowski / Huffpost 10 June 2019 The oxygen-starved area, which kills marine life and habitats, is expected to be the size of Massachusetts. Scientists are expecting this year’s “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico to be one of the largest in recorded history because of alarming amounts of rainfall and pollution. The [...]

Advocate staff 10 June 2019 The 2019 "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico could be the second largest on record because high water in the Mississippi River watershed will funnel excessive nutrients and fertilizer downstream this year. Every year, nutrients and fertilizer rush down the Mississippi River into the Gulf to create a [...]

Sarah Kaplan / Washington Post 10 June 2019 As rain deluged the Midwest this spring, commercial fisherman Ryan Bradley knew it was only a matter of time before the disaster reached him. All that water falling on all that fertilizer-enriched farmland would soon wend its way through streams and rivers into Bradley’s fishing grounds [...]

Sarah Gibbens / National Geographic 10 June 2019 Record-breaking Midwest rainfall washed tons of fertilizer and sewage water out to sea, contributing to a devastatingly large patch of polluted water, scientists say. Just off the coast of Louisiana and Texas where the Mississippi River empties, the ocean is dying. The cyclical event known as [...]

Jen Christensen / CNN 10 June, 2019 (CNN)The Gulf of Mexico could see one of its largest dead zones on record this summer, according to researchers. A "dead zone" is known in scientific literature as hypoxia, which means low oxygen. This water, with its low concentration of dissolved oxygen, can no longer support the life that [...]

The Associated Press / New York Times 10 June 2019 NEW ORLEANS — Scientists are predicting a near-record Gulf of Mexico "dead zone" where the water holds too little oxygen to sustain marine life. "A major factor contributing to the large dead zone this year is the abnormally high amount of spring rainfall in [...]

Halle Parker / Daily Comet 10 June, 2019 As a result of the unusually heavy rainfall across the Mississippi River watershed, scientists forecast that the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico may be 67 percent larger than average this year. The dead zone, or hypoxic zone, is an area in the Gulf with [...]

Steve Hardy / The Advocate 23 May 2019 State and federal officials said Thursday it was appearing more likely that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers would need to open the Morganza Spillway next month — for only the third time ever — to stave off what one likened to a “foreign disaster” flowing Louisiana’s way. [...]