Upper Mississippi River Basin and Protection Act Kind, Klobuchar push river water quality legislation By Mark Sommerhauser, msommerhauser@winonadailynews.comThursday, November 19, 2009 12:15 am , Winona Daily NewsScientists could better understand pollution in the upper Mississippi River under a proposal by Sen. Amy Klobuchar, DFL-Minn., and Rep. Ron Kind, D-Wis. Klobuchar and Kind want the U.S. [...]

SAB Says EPA Nutrient Criteria Guidance Is Inadequate, Not Defensible By Inside EPA11/23/09The criticisms come as EPA is moving forward in Florida to develop numeric nutrient criteria in response to an activist lawsuit and as environmentalists are pushing the agency to craft numeric criteria elsewhere, arguing that risk-based, quantitative numeric criteria are more easily enforceable [...]

Why Organic Fertilizers are Not the Solution to the Dead Zone in the Gulf of Mexico By Steve Savage November 12th, 2009, Environmental & Climate Science From the comment streams and emails I’ve been getting about recent posts, it is clear that many people believe things that are not actually true about the environmental profile [...]

EPA Cracking Down on Urban and Agricultural Runoff Blamed for Dead Zones By Matthew BergerNov 13th, 2009 , Daily Climate News and AnalysisNitrogen makes up almost 80 percent of the air in Earth’s atmosphere. But, since the 1960s, it has had a growing — and increasingly unsustainable —  presence in the planet’s waterways, as well. The [...]

Environmental connection: An editorial By Editorial page staff, The Times-PicayuneNovember 17, 2009, 11:01PMMs. Jackson, who was in New Orleans Tuesday for a national brownfields conference, can speak with some authority on how people in this region think. She's a native New Orleanian who happened to be here visiting family as the storm approached in 2005, [...]

EPA keeping close eye on Louisiana, new chief Lisa Jackson says in N.O. By Mark Schleifstein, The Times-Picayune November 18, 2009, 6:45AMLisa Jackson, a New Orleans native, was named EPA chief by President Barack Obama     "Many of these state programs are 20, 30 years old, and we might even need to hit the [...]

Two pollutants eyed for more regulation By Lee Bergquist of the Journal Sentinel Milwaukee WINov. 23, 2009 Lawyers for several environmental groups notified the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Monday of its intent to file suit against the agency for failing to protect state water from two forms of nutrient pollution –  phosphorus and nitrogen. [...]

UBC researchers find key microbial indicator of ocean health By WEBNEWSWIRE.COMOctober 25, 2009 - 01:00 Microbes specialize in metabolic innovation and many can use alternatives to oxygen, including nitrates, sulfates and metals, breathing these compounds instead of oxygen. These adaptations likely enable them to thrive in dead zones where their combined metabolic activity influences nutrient [...]

A&M researchers to study Gulf dead zone By Greg Barr , Senior Reporter, Houston Business JournalThursday, October 22, 2009, 1:07pm CDTDead zones, or hypoxia, occur when oxygen in water drops below 2 milligrams per liter. Severe hypoxia levels can result in fish kills and can affect the Gulf fishing industry. While the 2008 dead zone [...]

'Dead-zone' microbe measures ocean health By CBC News Thursday, October 22, 2009 | 2:58 PM, Canadian Broadcast Corporation  Researchers at the University of British Columbia and the U.S. Department of Energy say the microbe, called SUP05, is the most abundant organism in these oxygen-minimum zones and plays an important role in their ecosystems. Saanich Inlet [...]