Record Midwestern Flooding Means MA-Sized GOM Dead Zone: Bonus - Lake Erie Algae Blooms
In Midwestern farm country, this year’s wet, wild spring—which is likely tied to climate change—has already severely delayed planting and led to massive amounts of soil erosion. Now the downstream effects are coming into focus.
In June, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration projected a Massachusetts-sized dead zone would alight upon the Gulf of Mexico, driven by a vast algae bloom fed by fertilizer runoff from the upper Midwest. As the bloom decays, it sucks oxygen out of the water. As a result, as NOAA puts it, “habitats that would normally be teeming with life become, essentially, biological deserts.”
And on Thursday, NOAA predicted that Lake Erie, which provides drinking water to 11 million people, will also experience a massive harmful algae bloom, starting in late July. The bloom is fed largely by phosphorus runoff in the Maumee River basin in Ohio, where the land is dominated by corn and soybean farms as well as massive indoor hog farms. Phosphorus is a key nutrient for plant growth, and farmers apply it to fields in the form of fertilizer (which comes mainly from phosphate mines in Florida) and hog manure.
Phosphorus-laden fields, meet months of heavy rainstorms. When phosphorus runs off and gathers in Lake Erie, it acts as a kind of superfood for algae. The algae in turn generates microcystin, a toxin that can cause nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, severe headaches, fever, and even liver damage. Back in August 2014, officials in the city of Toledo (population 400,000) had to warn residents for several days not to drink or even bathe babies in their tap water, which had gotten contaminated with microcystin drawn from the lake.
EDIT
https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2019/07/this-years-wild-wet-spring-has-led-to-massive-blobs-of-toxic-algae/