This year's low-oxygen "dead zone" along Louisiana coast covers 5,052 square miles, an area the size of the state of Connecticut but about 800 square miles less than the 2013 dead zone, according to a week-long survey released Monday. Based on the 2014 results, the five-year average size of the low-oxygen area is 5,543 square miles, which is almost three times larger than the target set by a federal/state Mississippi River Gulf of Mexico Watershed Nutrient Task Force in 2001 as part of a national effort to reduce the size of the dead zone. The primary cause of the annual phenomenon is excess nutrient runoff from farms along the Mississippi River, which empties into the Gulf, said Gene Turner, a researcher at Louisiana State University's Coastal Ecology Institute. "While it is known that Louisiana is not one of the top contributors of dead zone-causing pollution, that is where the biggest impacts are felt," Matt Rota, Senior Policy Director for the Gulf Restoration Network, said in a recent statement. Share This Story 
 
 The Gulf Dead Zone is a huge swath of the Gulf of Mexico just west of the Mississippi River Delta that is nearly devoid of oxygen and proportionally saturated with nitrogen and phosphorus pollution. Rota associates unnatural dead zones with the oxygen deprivation caused by some harmful algae blooms. The number of dead zones worldwide currently totals more than 550 and has been increasing for decades, according to a report by Turner and Nancy Rabalais from the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium. In fact, it is thought that the Gulf Dead Zone is the second largest unnatural (or unnaturally augmented) dead zone in the world, with pollution coming from the Mississippi Delta bullying oxygen out of this environment. "The amount of nutrient loading from the river increased considerably in the 1960s as a result of more intense agricultural activity in the watershed," the scientists' release said. While the amount of nitrogen in the river has stabilized in recent years, it's still increasing, and the amount of nitrate among the nutrients in the water also is increasing. "It seems to have leveled out in size, but it could get worse" depending on changes in pollution levels, Rabalais said.
– A Connecticut-sized swath of oxygen-deprived waters off the Gulf Coast is a "poster child for how we are using and abusing our natural resources," says one researcher in Louisiana. In its 30th annual survey, the Louisiana Marine Consortium shows the dead zone has shrunk to about 5,000 square miles and may have stabilized, reports Reuters. (It previously measured as many as 8,200 square miles.) Still, the Gulf Coast dead zone remains second in size only to one off Finland; it extends along the Louisiana coastline from the Mississippi River Delta to the border with Texas. Since the 1960s, nitrogen fertilizer, mostly from Midwest cornfields, has been drawn into streams and rivers by rainwater and poured straight into the Gulf via the Mississippi and Atchafalaya rivers, the Times-Picayune explains. There it feeds algae blooms that turn oxygen into carbon dioxide when it decays—poor conditions for fish and shrimp. Nitrates and nitrogen levels continue to increase, the scientists say. The EPA has tried to shrink the dead zone to 1,991 square miles since 2001 and isn’t making progress. Environmental groups have sued the agency to force its hand in adopting needed regulations to reduce harmful runoff. "We keep being told by both regulators and industry that a hands-off approach … is working just fine, but the Dead Zone is clearly not going away," one attorney tells the Times-Picayune. Louisiana legislators claim the dead zone is natural and want to remove its Gulf waters from the "impaired waters list," reports Nature World News. Activists say similarly harmful algae blooms in both Ohio and Florida prove current efforts aren’t working. (In other bad news about algae blooms, toxic blooms are so common in Ohio that summertime swimming bans are "routine.")