Numerous "Suffocating" Dead Zones In Atlantic Ocean Identified By Biologists

For the first time, dead zones, or places where no animal can survive, have been spotted in Atlantic Ocean by a team of German and Canadian marine biologists. That is because almost no dissolved oxygen can be found in the water, according to rt.

Various areas that do not have oxygen have earlier been spotted along populated coastal areas in the eastern and southern coasts of the US and the Baltic Sea.

However, for the first time, it has been spotted in the open ocean.

The team watched the area for seven years and published their findings Thursday in the journal Biogeosciences.

The scientists claim that low-oxygenated patches of water were present in the Atlantic Ocean, according to washingtonpost. They are vast tracts that could be 100 square miles. Being seasonal, they also travel all the time. It is one of the biggest ever discovered forms in the Gulf of Mexico.

In these zones, some mixed-up nutrients and microbes are delivered from various places. The nutrients are fodder for algae, which in turn are eaten by microorganism. It generates waste and is then consumed by other microbes.

The whole process tends to use a lot of oxygen, leading to oxygen-free pockets.

The nutrient run-off here could transport a living animal or fish, which would need to move out immediately, or die out.

Most dead zones are found in shallow water. But in the Atlantic Ocean, researchers found that the dead zones look like 'eddies' or "underwater ocean cyclones that spin into a vortex" for months on end. The spinning vortex would set up a wall around the central core, which would quickly suck out the oxygen from it.

"The fast rotation of the eddies makes it very difficult to exchange oxygen across the boundary between the rotating current and the surrounding ocean. Moreover, the circulation creates a very shallow layer - of a few tens of meters - on top of the swirling water that supports intense plant growth," study author Johannes Karstensen of the University of Bremen says in the press release of the journal of the European Geosciences Union (EGU).

The dead zones even in the middle of the Atlantic could impact the people on land, particularly in Cape Verde, say scientists.

"Given that the few dead zones we observed propagated less than 100 kilometers north of the Cape Verde archipelago, it is not unlikely that an open-ocean dead zone will hit the islands at some point," Kartsensen explains. "This could cause the coast to be flooded with low-oxygen water, which may put severe stress on the coastal ecosystems and may even provoke fish kills and the die-off of other marine life."