Ancient Ocean 'Dead Zone' Delayed Life After Mass Extinction By Wynne Parry, LiveScience.com1 April 2011 A flood of nutrients may have created an oxygen-starved ocean about 250 million years ago, preventing life from bouncing back for a few million years after a mass extinction wiped out 90 percent of marine species, a new study indicates. [...]

Don't end DNR role in regulating water By Mike Delaney, opinion in the Des Moines Register7 April 2011The Raccoon River Watershed Association (RRWA) is opposed to transferring authority for water quality programs from the Iowa Department of Natural Resources to the Iowa Department of Agriculture (SF 500). The RRWA board believes that transferring the authority [...]

The EPA: Cleaning Up Crappy Water Since 1970 By Paula Crossfield, The Huffington Post24 March 2011 This is a story about crap -- literally, tons of it. Piling up in Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) and being sprayed onto farm fields, animal manure is polluting the nation's waterways and is nearly impossible to regulate. Last [...]

The Big Idea: Perennial Grains By By Robert Kunzig, National Geographic7 April 2011 Photograph by Rebecca Hale, NGM Staff Humans made an unwitting but fateful choice 10,000 years ago as we started cultivating wild plants: We chose annuals. All the grains that feed billions of people today—wheat, rice, corn, and so on—come from annual plants, [...]

Large slick' could be huge plankton bloom By Houma Today22 March 2011 HOUMA — Scientists at a Cocodrie marine-research center say a miles-long discolored patch on the Gulf originally feared to be oil may actually be a huge algae bloom — the kind that fuels the annual dead zone off Louisiana's coast.   The patch, estimated [...]

Eutrophication: Mapping the first steps that lead to dead zones By RTSea Blog19 March 2011  Dead Zones - an alarming term used to describe aquatic areas where oxygen levels are so greatly reduced as to push out or kill most fish, plants, and shellfish. It's a dramatic descriptor for the extreme end result of two much [...]

EPA takes heat over bay pollution 'diet' By Timothy B. Wheeler, The Baltimore Sun16 March 2011Farmers complained Wednesday to a sympathetic audience in Congress that the Environmental Protection Agency's "pollution diet" for restoring the Chesapeake Bay is based on flawed science and threatens to drive growers out of business with burdensome and unnecessary regulations. Appearing [...]

Republicans question EPAs stewardship of bay cleanup By Steve Kilar, CAPITAL NEWS SERVICE, The Daily Record16 March 2011WASHINGTON — The Environmental Protection Agency’s method to estimate the amount of poultry manure that leaches into the Chesapeake Bay was just one policy challenged during Wednesday’s meeting of the House Subcommittee on Conservation, Energy and Forestry. “In [...]

Environmental Groups Take Aim at Water District By KARI LYDERSEN, Chicago News Cooperative5 March 2011The dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico is an area the size of New Jersey where little marine life survives because algae suck virtually all oxygen from the water. Two years ago, the federal government found that Chicago is the [...]

BGSU researchers study beneficial winter algae By KRISTINA SMITH HORN, WATCHDOG/ENTERPRISE REPORTER, The News Messenger.com03 February 2011 Bowling Green State University researchers study diatom algae -- a winter species that they believe has a positive effect on the food web -- aboard the U.S. Coast Guard ship Neah Bay. (PHOTO SUBMITTED BY JASON KEMPTON) PORT CLINTON [...]