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Deadzones UQ---General

Solving dead zones depends on the federal government to manage programs

Committee on Environment and Natural Resources 10 [Committee on Environment and Natural Resources, Scientific Assessment of Hypoxia in U.S. Coastal Waters”, September 2010, http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/hypoxia-report.pdf]

The occurrence of hypoxia, or low dissolved oxygen, is increasing in coastal waters worldwide and represents a significant threat to the health and economy of our Nation’s coasts and Great Lakes. This trend is exemplified most dramatically off the coast of Louisiana and Texas, where the second largest eutrophicationrelated hypoxic zone in the world is associated with the nutrient pollutant load discharged by the Mississippi and Atchafalaya Rivers. Aquatic organisms require adequate dissolved oxygen to survive. The term “dead zone” is often used in reference to the absence of life (other than bacteria) from habitats that are devoid of oxygen. The inability to escape low oxygen areas makes immobile species, such as oysters and mussels, particularly vulnerable to hypoxia. These organisms can become stressed and may die due to hypoxia, resulting in significant impacts on marine food webs and the economy. Mobile organisms can flee the affected area when dissolved oxygen becomes too low. Nevertheless, fish kills can result from hypoxia, especially when the concentration of dissolved oxygen drops rapidly. New research is clarifying when hypoxia will cause fish kills as opposed to triggering avoidance behavior by fish. Further, new studies are better illustrating how habitat loss associated with hypoxia avoidance can impose ecological and economic costs, such as reduced growth in commercially harvested species and loss of biodiversity, habitat, and biomass. Transient or “diel-cycling” hypoxia, where conditions cycle from supersaturation of oxygen late in the afternoon to hypoxia or anoxia near dawn, most often occurs in shallow, eutrophic systems (e.g., nursery ground habitats) and may have pervasive impacts on living resources because of both its location and frequency of occurrence. Although coastal hypoxia can be caused by natural processes, a dramatic increase in the number of U.S. waters developing hypoxia is linked to eutrophication due to nutrient (nitrogen and phosphorus) and organic matter enrichment resulting from human activities. Sources of enrichment include point source discharges of wastewaters, nonpoint source atmospheric deposition, and nonpoint source runoff from croplands, lands used for animal agriculture, and urban and suburban areas. The incidence of hypoxia has increased ten-fold globally in the past 50 years and almost thirty-fold in the United States since 1960, with more than 300 systems recently experiencing hypoxia (Diaz & Rosenberg 2008; Table 1 and Appendix III). Diffuse runoff from nonpoint sources, such as agriculture fields, can be difficult to control, although improved production methods that reduce tillage, optimize fertilizer application, and buffer fields from waterways can mitigate water quality impairments. Despite the use of improved production methods in recent years, agriculture is still a leading source of nutrient pollution in many watersheds due, in part, to the high demand for nitrogen-intensive crops, principally corn. Furthermore, drainage practices, including tile drainage, have brought wetlands into crop production, short-circuited pathways (such as denitrification) that could ameliorate nutrient loading, and increased the transport of nitrogen into waterways. Atmospheric nitrogen deposition due to fossil fuel combustion has declined in many areas due to emission controls, but it remains an important source of diffuse nutrient loading. The difficulty of reducing nutrient inputs to coastal waters results from the close association between nutrient loading and a broad array of human activities in watersheds and explains the growth in the number and size of hypoxic zones. Unfortunately, hypoxia is not the only stressor impacting coastal ecosystems. Overfishing, harmful algal blooms (HABs), toxic contaminants, and physical alteration of coastal habitats associated with coastal development are several problems that co-occur with hypoxia and interact to decrease the ecological health of coastal waters and reduce the ecological services that they can provide. Executive Summary2 Scientific Assessment of Hypoxia in U.S. Coastal Waters Executive Summary Legislative Mandates for Action The Harmful Algal Bloom and Hypoxia Research and Control Act (HABHRCA) mandated creation of this report, which serves as a thorough update to the first scientific assessment of hypoxia released in 2003. Several other legislative drivers also influence how Federal agencies work on coastal water quality including the Clean Water Act; the Food, Conservation, and Energy Act of 2008 (“Farm Bill”); the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007; and the Coastal Zone Management Act. Responsibility for resolving hypoxia spans several Federal agencies (U.S. Department of Agriculture, U.S. Geological Survey, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), which oversee research and management/control programs (Appendix I). States play a critical role in monitoring and managing hypoxia, but their efforts are not addressed in detail here because this report was mandated to focus on Federal efforts.

Deadzones UQ---Nature Fails

We can’t rely on nature to solve all the problems; natural solutions have only worked in a few of the hundreds of dead zones.

University of Texas. "Hydrologists Find Mississippi River's Buffering System for Nitrates Is Overwhelmed." Home. University of Texas at Austin, 12 May 2014. Web. 15 July 2014. .

AUSTIN, Texas — A new method of measuring the interaction of surface water and groundwater along the length of the Mississippi River network adds fresh evidence that the network’s natural ability to chemically filter out nitrates is being overwhelmed.¶ The research by hydrogeologists at The University of Texas at Austin, which appears in the May 11 edition of the journal Nature Geoscience, shows for the first time that virtually every drop of water coursing through 311,000 miles (500,000 kilometers) of waterways in the Mississippi River network goes through a natural filtering process as it flows to the Gulf of Mexico.¶ The analysis found that 99.6 percent of the water in the network passes through filtering sediment along the banks of creeks, streams and rivers.¶ Such a high level of chemical filtration might sound positive, but the unfortunate implication is that the river’s natural filtration systems for nitrates appear to be operating at or very close to full capacity. Although further research is needed, this would make it unlikely that natural systems can accommodate the high levels of nitrates that have made their way from farmland and other sources into the river network’s waterways.¶ As a result of its filtration systems being overwhelmed, the river system operates less as a buffer and more as a conveyor belt, transporting nitrates to the Gulf of Mexico. The amount of nitrates flowing into the gulf from the Mississippi has already created the world’s second biggest dead zone, an oxygen-depleted area where fish and other aquatic life can’t survive.¶ The research, conducted by Bayani Cardenas, associate professor of hydrogeology, and Brian Kiel, a Ph.D. candidate in geology at the university’s Jackson School of Geosciences, provides valuable information to those who manage water quality efforts, including the tracking of nitrogen fertilizers used to grow crops in the Midwest, in the Mississippi River network.¶ “There’s been a lot of work to understand surface-groundwater exchange,” said Aaron Packman, a professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Northwestern University. “This is the first work putting together a physics-based estimate on the scale of one of these big rivers, looking at the net effect of nitrate removal in big river systems.”¶ The Mississippi River network includes the Ohio River watershed on the east and the Missouri River watershed in the west as well as the Mississippi watershed in the middle.¶ Using detailed, ground-level data from the United States Geological Survey (USGS) and Environmental Protection Agency, Cardenas and Kiel analyzed the waterways for sinuosity (how much they bend and curve); the texture of the materials along the waterways; the time spent in the sediment (known as the hyporheic zone); and the rate at which the water flows through the sediment.¶ The sediment operates as a chemical filter in that microbes in the sand, gravel and mud gobble up compounds such as oxygen and nitrates from the water before the water discharges back into the stream. The more time the water spends in sediment, the more some of these compounds are transformed to potentially more environmentally benign forms.¶ One compound, nitrate, is a major component of inorganic fertilizers that has helped make the area encompassed by the Mississippi River network the biggest producer of corn, soybeans, wheat, cattle and hogs in the United States.¶ But too much nitrogen robs water of oxygen, resulting in algal blooms and dead zones.¶ Although the biggest sources of nitrates in the Mississippi River network are industrial fertilizers, nitrates also come from animal manure, urban areas, wastewater treatment and other sources, according to USGS.¶ Cardenas and Kiel found that despite an image of water flowing freely downstream, nearly each drop gets caught up within the bank at one time or another. But not much of the water — only 24 percent — lingers long enough for nitrate to be chemically extracted.¶ The “residence times” when water entered the hyporheic zones ranged from less than an hour in the river system’s headwaters to more than a month in larger, meandering channels. A previous, unrelated study of hyporheic zones found that a residence time of about seven hours is required to extract nitrogen from the water.¶ Cardenas said the research provides a large-scale, holistic view of the river network’s natural buffering mechanism and how it is failing to operate effectively.¶ “Clearly for all this nitrate to make it downstream tells us that this system is very overwhelmed,” Cardenas said.¶ The new model, he added, can be a first step to enable a wider analysis of the river system.¶ When a river system gets totally overwhelmed, “You lose the chemical functions, the chemical buffering,” said Cardenas. “I don’t know whether we’re there already, but we are one big step closer to the answer now.”