OXYGEN-starved waters have invaded the shallows off Oregon in the US, making a graveyard of a 70-kilometre stretch previously teeming with marine life.
Francis Chan of Oregon State University in Corvallis and his team sailed into the “dead zone” on 8 August to search for signs of life using a robotic submarine, but found little but corpses. This is the fifth year in a row that a dead zone has appeared in the region, but this year’s die-off has been the most severe, with dramatic drops in oxygen levels.
“In past years, we measured oxygen concentrations down to about 0.5 millilitres per litre of ocean water,”…
