According to the editors of the journal Nature Geoscience, an area of the so-called "dead zone" has been discovered in the northwestern part of the Indian Ocean. This is an area of water that contains practically no oxygen in its composition. The uniqueness of this find is that previously recorded similar areas did not exceed a couple of square kilometers. Scientists associate the appearance of "dead zones" with the influence of global warming and the gradual extinction of the ocean.
Specialists from the University of Southern Denmark, together with their German colleagues from the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology and the National Institute of Oceanography from India, are behind the discovery. The find of scientists, as already indicated, is located in the northwestern part of the Indian Ocean, or to be precise, in the Bay of Bengal. Its area is 60,000 square kilometers, and there is a "dead zone" at a depth of 100 to 400 meters.
There is practically no oxygen in these waters, but there is a lot of nitrogen, microorganisms for the processing of which are also absent here. According to the researchers, global warming and melting of glaciers are leading to an increase in water volumes and an expansion of the ocean. And the densely populated areas of the Bay of Bengal contribute to the penetration of a large amount of nitrogen into the world ocean from fertilizers used in agriculture. These two factors together lead to the growth of the "dead zone" and the disappearance of living organisms from the aquatic environment. According to lead author Laura Bristow,
“Standard techniques have not recorded signs of nitrogen loss in the Strait of Bengal, as it does in other dead zones. Now the total area of "dead zones" around the globe exceeds 245 thousand square kilometers, and they continue to grow."
Station for the study of waters in the Strait of Bengal
Similar "dead zones" (albeit much smaller in volume) have already been found off the coast of North and South America, Namibia, off the western coast of India and in the Arabian Sea. Ocean scientists predict the emergence of even more "dead zones" in the future, if measures are not taken now to combat the factors provoking them.
VLADIMIR KUZNETSOV
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