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Devastating Ocean Dead Zone in the Gulf of Mexico Likely to be Around for a While
Improving the water quality in the Gulf of Mexico is likely to take decades, a new study released by scientists from the University of Waterloo has revealed. And, just recently a state of emergency was declared in Florida as the algae bloom is having a large impact on the state. As the Washington Post reports: "The red tide has made breathing difficult for locals, scared away tourists, and strewn popular beaches with the stinking carcasses of fish, eels, porpoises, turtles, manatees and one 26-foot whale shark." The results of the study, which was recently published in Science, indicate that policy goals set for decreasing the size of the dead zone in the northern Gulf of Mexico are probably unrealistic without major shifts in agricultural management practices as well as improvements to how freshwater systems are managed. Large concentrations of nitrogen transported from streams and rivers across the US corn belt into the ocean is believed to have fueled algal blooms in the northern Gulf of Mexico, which strip oxygen from the water as they die off, resulting in an extensive hypoxic 'dead zone' where marine life struggle to survive due to the very low oxygen levels. Rivers throughout the region ran high, likely carrying more sediment than usual into the Gulf. The rivers also carry nutrients like iron from soil and nitrogen from fertilizers. These nutrients fuel the growth of phytoplankton, tiny, plant-like organisms that grow in the ocean surface waters. Phytoplankton blooms colour the ocean blue and green and may be contributing to the colour seen here. According to Kimberley Van Meter, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Waterloo and lead author of the study: "Despite the investment of large amounts of money in recent years to improve water quality, the area of last year's dead zone was more than 22,000 km2--about the size of the state of New Jersey." After analyzing agricultural data spanning more than two centuries, the researchers found that nitrogen has accumulated in the soil and groundwater over the years due to intensive agricultural practices, and as a result of this reservoir, the rate of nitrogen flow to the coast is not likely to abate anytime soon, but rather will continue for decades. Water quality in the northern Gulf of Mexico has increasingly deteriorated since the 1950's, primarily due to the widespread application of commercial fertilizers to crops as well as intensive livestock farming across the Mississippi River Basin. Commercial fertilizers and manure both contain high levels of nitrogen — a plant nutrient that is used to boost crop production. However, when nitrogen is present in high concentrations it can pose both an environmental and human health risk. When farmers do take measures to reduce their nitrogen input it takes a long time before this has any beneficial affect on water quality. "We are seeing long time lags between the adoption of conservation measures by farmers and any measurable improvements in water quality," said Prof. Nandita Basu, an associate professor in the departments of Earth and Environmental Sciences and Civil and Environmental Engineering at Waterloo, and co-author of the study. After modeling several scenarios, the study shows that even with best-case scenarios, where conservation measures are implemented with immediate effect, it is likely to take around 30 years for the excess nitrogen that has accumulated within agricultural soils and underground water reservoirs to be depleted. According to Basu, this problem is not limited to the Mississippi River Basin. As the global population grows, and with it the need for intensive agricultural practices to be able to produce enough food to meet the increased food demands, nitrogen is accumulating in soils and groundwater across the world, threatening coastal ecosystems the world over. The scientists are currently expanding their analysis to include phosphorus, another plant nutrient that is a major contributor to algal blooms in inland freshwater systems such as the Great Lakes. Journal Reference: K. J. Van Meter, P. Van Cappellen, N. B. Basu. Legacy nitrogen may prevent achievement of water quality goals in the Gulf of Mexico. Science, 2018; eaar4462 DOI: 10.1126/science.aar4462
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Breaking it Down: What are the Chemical Byproducts of the Water Treatment Process?
Synthetic chemicals are found everywhere in our modern everyday life. They are in the clothing we wear, as well as in cosmetics, personal care products and medications that we use everyday. But we tend to give little thought to what happens to these chemicals when we flush them away, assuming they are harmless once they disappear down the sink. The reality is that most wastewater treatment facilities do not have the capacity to remove synthetic organic chemicals such as those used in personal care products, pharmaceuticals and opioids. So, what happens to them? Because wastewater treatment plants are not capable of removing these chemicals, trace amounts remain in the effluent that wastewater treatment facilities discharge into streams, rivers and lakes. Although these concentrations are extremely minute, mere nanograms or micrograms, very little is known about how the risk they pose to the environment or to human health.Credit: Sarah Bird/Michigan TechWhat is more worrying, is that even less is known about the environmental and human health risk posed by chemical byproducts formed during the water treatment process, where thousands of potentially harmful byproducts can be formed in just a few minutes. A new study, which was recently published in the American Chemical Society's journal Environmental Science and Technology, has sought to shed more light on the mechanisms that enable the formation of chemical byproducts during the wastewater treatment process looking at acetone as a case study to determine the chemical byproducts that are created as acetone breaks down during advanced oxidation wastewater treatment process. Chemically speaking, acetone has rather a simple structure, which makes it the ideal candidate for modeling chemical reaction pathways — the various ways a chemical can break down into free-radicals and chemical byproducts — in order to predict what byproducts and free-radicals can form. "When we do water treatment using advanced chemical oxidation, those oxidants destroy target organic compounds but create byproducts," explains Daisuke Minakata, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Michigan Technological University and lead author of the study. "Some byproducts may be more toxic than their parent compound. We need to understand the fundamental mechanisms of how the byproducts are produced and then we can predict what to be produced from many other chemicals. We found more than 200 reactions involved in acetone degradations based on computational work." The researchers then compared the results predicted by their model to ten byproducts observed in an earlier experimental study, and found that the modeled results were similar to those observed in the experimental study. Advanced oxidation is an important water treatment method that is effective at removing contaminants. However, many communities, particularly those living in arid regions, are facing water scarcity and are forced to recycle treated wastewater for reuse. Should synthetic organic chemicals together with the byproducts that form during the oxidation process remain in the water, animals and people who consume that water will also consume the chemicals present in the water. In other areas, wastewater from communities living upstream is discharged into rivers and lakes. Communities living further downstream may depend on that water as a source of drinking water. As conventional water treatment processes are incapable of effectively removing all the organic chemicals, these consumers are exposed to the chemicals that remain in the water. According to the authors: "Advanced oxidation can effectively target specific organic chemicals to remove them from water. Modeling reaction pathways is critical to help water treatment managers understand how best to wield the knife, as it were." For the study, the team calculated the chemical reaction pathways using Michigan Tech's Superior supercomputer, however the model is limited to organic contaminants that have a simple structure like acetone. Organic chemicals tend to have much more complex structures, making their reaction pathways nigh impossible for even a supercomputer like Superior to compute.According to the authors: "Understanding the mechanisms of chemical byproduct formation isn't just important for water treatment; it's also advancing what we know about chemical reactions in the atmosphere and inside our bodies."Journal Reference: Divya Kamath, Stephen P. Mezyk, Daisuke Minakata. Elucidating the Elementary Reaction Pathways and Kinetics of Hydroxyl Radical-Induced Acetone Degradation in Aqueous Phase Advanced Oxidation Processes. Environmental Science & Technology, 2018; DOI: 10.1021/acs.est.8b00582
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