FRANCE: A team of researchers have reported the discovery of moving ‘dead zones’ in the tropical North Atlantic, several hundred kilometres off the coast of West Africa. The areas have so little oxygen that most marine life cannot survive in them and, if they approach land, they could cause mass fish die-offs.
The large, swirling eddies of water contain the lowest levels of oxygen ever recorded in open water in the Atlantic and are moving slowly westward, according to research published in the open access journal Biogeosciences.
In addition to the obvious environmental implications, there are serious potential economic impacts. Low oxygen content in ocean waters has been linked to declining commercial fish stocks in the Baltic Sea and elsewhere.
“Before our study, it was thought that the open waters of the North Atlantic had minimum oxygen concentrations of about 40 micromol per litre of seawater, or about one millilitre of dissolved oxygen per litre of seawater,” says lead-author Johannes Karstensen, a researcher at GEOMAR, the Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel, in Kiel, Germany in a statement.
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