The annual forecast for the “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico, which president Trump has renamed the Gulf of America, predicts the section of water where oxygen is unnaturally low will be about average in size this year. What’s not average is the uncertainty over whether government-backed efforts to reduce its size will falter as the Trump administration scales back federal agencies involved in the process.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicts the dead zone will be around 5,500 square miles this summer. Some estimates put it a little smaller, like those from Louisiana State University (LSU) research scientists Nancy Rabalais and R. Eugene Turner. That study predicts the hypoxic zone to be around 4,800 square miles by taking into account how warmer water temperatures have altered the complex food web, helping reduce the dead-zone.
But these different models share one key element; the predicted size is about three times bigger than desired.
A basin-wide problem
When nitrogen and phosphorus from farming fertilizers upriver washes down into the Gulf, the excess nutrients can cause algae to bloom near the surface of the water. This algae dies and decomposes, sinking deeper into the water and depleting the oxygen that fish and other aquatic life need to survive, affecting commercial and recreational fishing as well as causing ecological harm.
Efforts to reduce nutrient loading in the Gulf are largely outlined in the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Hypoxia Task Force Action Plan. Long-term, the goal is to reduce the zone to about 1,900 square miles by 2035. The plan’s short-term goal is to reduce the amount of nitrogen and phosphorus emptying into the Gulf by 20% of long-term average this year.
Data from the United States Geological Survey (USGS), an integral element in predicting the annual size of the dead zone, found that the phosphorus load was up 31% but nitrate loads were about 24% below average long-term levels in May.
While these numbers show a reduction in nitrogen, the main driver of hypoxia in the Gulf, that’s just a snapshot from a single month, said Doug Daigle, LSU coastal research scientist and coordinator for the Louisiana Hypoxia Working Group, an organization working to address the Gulf’s dead zone. He emphasised that it’s really multi-year data that will give the most accurate picture into whether the U.S. is on target to meet its goals.
“Obviously you don't like it to be bigger in the years when it's bigger, but then we also need to keep it in perspective in years when it's smaller. It's the trend over time that we're looking at,” he said. “And we’re not at square one.”
Uncertainty ahead
Whether key federal agencies such as the USGS and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) will have sufficient funding and manpower to gauge if reduction goals are even being met is uncertain, said Daigle.
“There’s a lot of question marks about what's happening to the federal agencies and their capacity … between the mass firings and all the other things that are happening,” he said. Large sections of NOAA’s staff have been reduced, and USGS research and data collection funding faces millions of dollars in cutbacks.
Daigle added that there’s supposed to be a meeting of the Hypoxia Task Force later this year, but with all of the federal changes, they might not have the bandwidth to assess whether reduction goals are being met.
“That's all tentative at this point,” he said.
The EPA, co-chair of the Gulf Hypoxia Task Force, responded from its press office that it “takes this initiative very seriously” and will continue progress. It did not respond to specific questions over staffing capacity and funding resources. NOAA’s press office also declined to comment on staffing capacity, saying it “remains dedicated to providing timely information, research and resources.”
Several federal task force member positions remain vacant as of June 12, with only “TBD” listed for spots reserved for USGS, EPA, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and multiple other federal agencies on the EPA’s website.
NOAA predicts the size of the dead-zone at the beginning of the summer using an aggregate of models from various partner universities, including Louisiana State University and the University of Michigan, to try and anticipate how big the low-oxygen area that threatens fish and aquatic life will be. The agency will monitor and survey the dead zone throughout the summer and release size estimates of the actual dead zone in August.
“The driving force is the amount of nitrate – nitrogen – that's loaded into the Gulf of Mexico,” said Rabalais.
“It’s about human behavior. There's both a watershed issue and a global climate change issue here,” said Turner.
Turner and Rabalais agreed the problem isn’t with the plan, but a need for greater efforts to reduce nitrogen runoff upstream.
“Every place is going to be a little different, but there are ways to reduce this,” said Turner.
Methods like cover crops and crop rotation strategies help both farmers keep fertilizer in their soil for better plant growth and reduce hypoxia-causing runoff.
Whether funding will continue to support these programs is another unknown. Aside from some Inflation Reduction Act money and funds from previous Farm Bills, financial support for nutrient reduction has been “modest,” said Daigle. Federal cuts don’t promise much more on the horizon.
“There's a lot of questions about what's going to happen,” he said.
That translates to uncertainty for industries like seafood and shrimp, too, said Daigle.
“They're under a lot of stress” from hurricanes and the influx of cheap, foreign shrimp saturating the market, he said. Reducing the hypoxic zone before it becomes the final nail in the coffin for shrimping in the Gulf is part of the Task Force’s plan. Daigle said now is the time to really drive home on these reduction strategies.
“The idea was that you wouldn't wait for that to happen. You start reducing the loading, you reverse the trend,” he said.
This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri in partnership with Report for America, with major funding from the Walton Family Foundation.