A guy named Nick Risinger recently quit his day job and spent a year travelling around the world, taking incredible photographs of the night sky with some impressive camera equipment. He’s created a gorgeous website showing the results. You can read more about him in this Washington Post article.
Dead zones in coastal oceans are created when fertilizer gets washed off from land into the ocean. Fertilizing the ocean causes blooms of algae which eventually die and sink to the bottom, where they get decomposed by bacteria. Most of the bacteria doing the decomposition work need oxygen just like the rest of us, and if there’s enough dead algae sinking to the bottom, the industrious bacteria can use up all the available oxygen, effectively suffocating any other creature in the area. Mobile animals like fish and shrimp can swim away, if the dead zone forms slowly enough for them to escape. Animals that can’t swim such as corals, oysters, and sea stars, are stuck with the environment they have.
The current record-breaking floods are carrying record-breaking amounts of fertilizer from the entire Mississippi watershed directly into the Gulf of Mexico. Because of this, researchers at the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium are expecting the largest dead zone ever recorded in the Gulf.
The largest dead zone ever recorded there was 8,484 square miles, in 2002 – larger than the state of Massachusetts.
Why is so much fertilizer applied to agricultural fields that it ends up running off into the Gulf of Mexico? Because it’s the easiest, cheapest way to increase crop yields. Farmers and farming corporations want to make as much money as they can for their efforts, just like the rest of us.
Here is another set of Mississippi flood images, this time a comparison from the same dates in 2010 and 2011. The blue water stands out clearly against the brown of open soil and the vivid green which represents vegetation; the colors have been chosen to enhance the contrast between water and land (Images from NASA’s MODIS, read more detail here).
May 6, 2010
May 6, 2011
The recent flooding on the Mississippi has been receiving national news attention. Here are some dramatic satellite images showing the difference between 2010 and 2011. These show the same site near Memphis, Tennessee, and you can clearly see where vast tracts of land have flooded this year (from Landsat 5, courtesy of NASA):
April 21, 2010
May 10, 2011
NASA released this gorgeous image of the Parana River in Argentina; not a heavily processed satellite image but an actual photograph taken by an astronaut on the International Space Station. Read more about it at NASA’s Earth Observatory
microbes to manatees 