In a decades-long crisis, marine life has suffered as oxygen periodically dwindles in waters along the Gulf Coast.
In a decades-long crisis, marine life has suffered as oxygen periodically dwindles in waters along the Gulf Coast.
Reporting from Baton Rouge and Houma, La.
On a sweltering night in late July, a team of scientists gathered onboard the R.V. Pelican in Houma, La., a 116-foot blue-and-white vessel resting in a bed of water hyacinths under a stormy sunset.
As the clock ticked toward their midnight castoff, the scientists raced to set up the last of their equipment in the ship’s small laboratories. For the next week, they would be working 24-hour days in tight quarters to measure what little oxygen was left in the Gulf of Mexico’s infamous dead zone.
The dead zone results from excess nutrients, mostly from fertilizers, running off farmland into the Mississippi River and finally into the Gulf. The size of the oxygen-starved zone changes every year, growing as more nutrients make their way into the Gulf and shrinking when tropical storms or strong currents mix the water.
Nearly every year since 1985, teams from Louisiana State University and the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium have spent a week at sea mapping the zone. At each of the dozens of sites dotting the coastal Gulf, these teams don hard hats and steel-toe boots and then cast into the sea the box cores, sensors and water sampling bottles that make their work possible.
The route the team takes is the same every year, allowing each crew to contribute to a decades-long catalog of changes in these waters. It’s an invaluable way to see how policies and industry changes have altered biodiversity in the Gulf and nutrient flow through the Mississippi.
This year’s crew of 12 — all students, staff members and friends of Cassandra Glaspie, the principal investigator and an L.S.U. marine ecologist — were eager to join the storied tradition of the cruise and worked frenetically in the hours before castoff.
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