Christina Watkins / BRProud.com 24 June 2019 The Louisiana Department of Health issued an advisory Friday for a potentially large algal bloom developing in Lake Pontchartrain. The department is advising people to avoid contact, including swimming, with blue-green algae as exposure can be harmful for some people. An algal bloom is the rapid growth of [...]

Rebecca Lindsey / Climate.gov 18 June 2019 The extremely wet 2019 spring that brought terrible flooding to large parts of the Missouri and Mississippi River watersheds has also set the stage for a very large ‘dead zone’ in the Gulf of Mexico later this summer. Last week, NOAA issued its annual forecast, saying that the summer dead zone—an area [...]

Tony Briscoe / Chicago Tribune 14 June, 2019 Just off the coast of Louisiana, where the Mississippi River lets out into the Gulf of Mexico, an enormous algae bloom, fueled by fertilizer from Midwestern farm fields and urban sewage, creates an area so devoid of oxygen it’s uninhabitable to most marine life every summer. Nutrients [...]

Jessica Corbett / Common Dreams 11 June 2019 While the near-record forecast is partly due to the "abnormally high amount of spring rainfall" in the Midwest, experts also called for agricultural reforms to address the alarming long-term trend. U.S. scientists on Monday warned that because of runoff from human activities—such as urbanization and agriculture—this summer's [...]

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 little [...]

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 like [...]

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 oxygen-starved [...]

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 zone [...]

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 in [...]

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 the [...]