Thursday, March 22, 2018
A paper by Kim Van Meter, Philippe Van Cappellen and Nandita Basu published in the journal Science shows that even under the most favourable management scenarios reducing the hypoxic zone in the northern Gulf of Mexico may take many decades, because of the accumulation of large amounts of nitrogen in rural soils due to years of intensive agriculture in the Mississippi River basin.The slow release of this legacy nitrogen creates long lag times between the implementation of conservation practices and measurable improvements in water quality.