Artificial Fertilizers

What are artificial fertilizers and what are they good for

Dead zones are caused by a variety of factors, but one of the most common is the use of artificial fertilizers. One of the most successful cleanups in the Black Sea was actually caused by stopping the usage of artificial fertilizers(this was actually not intentional, an economic collapse in the region led to the inability to use these farming techniques, but that's another story). So one question that immediately follows is "why not stop using artificial fertilizers full stop? The answer to that is somewhat complex, and the short of it is that it's almost certainly impractical to do so.

So what is artificial fertilizer anyways?

Artificial fertilizer is soil with a variety of additives designed to make it yield a better crop. The biggest and most notable(and most infamous) of these is nitrogen, which also happens to be what we are interested in. In the 1800's a process for extracting nitrogen was developed and leveraged to insert this nitrogen into the soil. This nitrogen has a lot of potential energy, which is good for fueling things such as plant growth or explosions (hence fertilizer bombs, in fact a good deal of the original research for extracting nitrogen was from military developments). Today a more modern process known as the Haber-Bosch process is used, but the idea remains the same, take dirt, add macronutrients for plants to eat, add nitrogen and voila, good fertilizer. These ingredients are found naturally in several places, most notably in manure, however not in quite as ideal quantities as in artificial fertilizers.

Only a small portion of the nitrogen actually goes into the plants, so the rest is runoff, which is where it goes into the ocean. In the ocean it has exactly the same effect that it does on land, it causes plants to grow really well. If these plants happen to be certain types of algae, then the air is consumed in water and dead zones occur. There is a certain irony that an excess of life causes death, but this an example of natures delicate balance, if one plant gets too greedy or successful, the whole system suffers.

Artificial fertilizer is one of the major achievements of the industrial revolution, and to this day is one of the most influential inventions ever made. This is also only a brief overview of the whole details, for example there are both organic and inorganic fertilizers, there are a variety of styles and recipes for making and a variety of ways they are used, however the fundamental goal of these fertilizers is to make stuff grow, and when they are turned into runoff, they are still active, and succeed in the ocean as well as they did on land, disrupting a delicate ecosystem.

Solutions to Dead Zones

From Youtube user: LawerenceStillYou

Been searching high and low and all over the internet for an amusing video that can provide another way of explaining what dead zones are - and I found one! I discovered this short stop motion animation clip on Youtube and not only is it entertaining, but it explicitly explains what a dead zone is without any fancy scientific jargon! 

However, what the video doesn’t provide is a solution to dead zones. The simplest solution (although it’s been the most difficult to implement) is keeping our waters clean.

Some solutions might be:
- Reducing/Eliminating the run-off of fertilizer sediment from nearby farms. This solution is arguable the most difficult to attain because farmers rely heavily on fertilizer for their farms. But by reducing the amount of fertilizer used and only using what the soil can absorb can make a big difference in what is poured into the oceans.
- Better handling of chemical releases from factories and farms. The chemicals end up getting washed away into the nearby waters, creating more harm for the marine life.
- Take care of the environment. This can look like many things whether it’s spreading more awareness of the issue, donating or volunteering with an organization, by taking action we can continue saving the marine life in our oceans as well as build for a cleaner environment in the future.

Source: http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/dbeckman/solutions_for_shrinking_the_de.html

- Luann Algoso

Dead Pigs Used to Investigate Dead Zones

I, for one, am a huge fan of pigs. Porky pig, Babe, Wilbur from Charlotte’s Web and so forth. Especially when they’re dead because who doesn’t love bacon? Apologies to all of the vegans and vegetarians out there! But this interesting use of dead pigs in order to further research dead zones is one that is unique and perhaps, never graced a scientist’s mind until now.

Pigs anatomy is quite similar to us humans as we “share their relatively hairless skin, are similar in size, and our flesh has a similar make-up” according to an article from BBC NEWS. A group of scientists from Canada collaborated on the idea of using dead pigs to study the effects of what happens to them when put in these dead zone areas. What then happened is Dr. Verena Tunnicliffe, professor of marine biology at the University of Victoria in Canada, and her team set out to find out "how low marine scavengers would go, in terms of oxygen, for a free lunch.”

Three pigs were lowered into different depths of sea levels, the first at the shallowest and the third at the deepest in order to see how far the sea creatures would make the trek, in low oxygen waters, in order to get the food. What results is a free-for-all buffet, guests ranging from crabs, shrimp, octopus and sea stars. Later in the research six-gill sharks were found devouring the pigs.

The purpose of the study, according to Tunnicliffe, is to recognize that "These scavengers get the carbon cycle back. We have to get the nutrients back in the system and start this restoration process." She says that this provides insight into how marine ecosystems can recover from hypoxia - and that it gives scientists some hope.

Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8545155.stm

- Luann Algoso

Is drinking water pure enough?

Drinking water is taken mainly from the lakes and rivers that are supposedly pure water. Water -full of nitrogen and phosphorous- comes out the farms to these sources contaminating them with threatening nutrients. When the water is taken to be treated for drinking, it’s not really cleaned out of nitrate and phosphorus that are toxic to the living being. Nitrate could cause blue baby syndrome to infants and affect the thyroid gland in adults.

Cleaning water from these toxics is neither easy nor cheap! It costs more than $4.8 billion annually to remove nitrate by itself, and $12-$56 million for to treat water in a town of 100,000 people from cyanobacterial blooms and cyanotoxins caused by phosphorus (USDA).

As you can see, cleaning up all these pollutants is not easy; the more practical and satisfying solution is preventing this and looking up the source. Farms and the fertilizers they use is the cause. Congress should reward farmers who try to save drinking water. It all comes from their farms and would get better if they tried to make it better. We should all unify against theses pollutions and take action. We could contact the Congress and ask for strict regulations to prevent this. We could also volunteer or donate to some agencies to check the purity of our near source for drinking water –could be your tap water-. Some of these agencies are Clean Water Action, and Clean water Network. Last but not least, a little thing that each individual could do to protect their own drinking water is using filters.

Source: http://www.ewg.org/report/troubledwaters

Agencies:

Clean Water Action:

http://www.cleanwateraction.org/

Clean Water Network:

http://www.cleanwaternetwork.org/

Explaining Dead Zones to children

     Teaching and educating ourselves about Dead Zone is an important role, as well as teaching the new generation about it. It would provide them with a better sense and care to the environment they live in. Educating the young is the  weapon to find better solutions and make stronger impact, because if they got into it, they will try to do something about it even if it was later in their lives.

A simple experiment that could be applied to middle school age class taken from Teach ocean sience website. This experiment is as follow:

     Take three bottles, add tab water to the first, lake or river water to the second, and lake or river water to third. Add fertilizer to the last one and expose them all to the sunlight for few days. Let the students observe and record the changes to the color and smell that occur to each one of them. You could use Vernier lab probe to measure the oxygen readings as well. Keep all bottles in the dark afterwards and let the students observe them after few days again. That could teach them about Dead Zone and how they occur.

  

You don’t have to be a teacher to do this experiment; you can conduct it with your kids, siblings, or relatives. It’s very easy to perform and explain.

Source of the experiment: http://www.teachoceanscience.net/teaching_resources/education_modules/dead_zones/access_classroom_resources/

What does corn have to do with Dead zone?

Corn is the foremost source of nitrogen and also phosphorous related to dead zone of the Gulf of Mexico. The corn contributes 52% of nitrogen and 25% of phosphorous that are the major pollution components of the dead zones. The urge of growing corn aroused from it being a very good source for ethanol that’s used as a biofuel. The problem is not in the increasing growing of corn, but it’s in the corn farming. Corn receives 40% of the total fertilizers given to croplands in the US even though it is planted in less than 23% of the cropland. As a result for that, so many amounts of nitrogen and phosphorous are being washed away by the rain and melting ice and getting into the ground and to water surfaces.

Now what could be done to decrease the risks of growing corn? Stop planting it?

Maybe yes, but it wouldn’t be reasonable solution! The U.S. department of Agriculture states that most farmlands need to plant a winter cover crop that would benefit in preventing erosion and providing fertilizers for the next year’s crop. Another solution would be stop feeding the remainings of the corn after processing it into ethanol (proteins and nutrients) to animals. The material remaining is concentrated of phosphorous and if the animals’ waste is used as a fertilizer, it would increase phosphorus contamination in surface waters. So, be careful what you give to your livestock. A final solution would be using other sources for biofuels to make the urge of planting corn much less. These sources could be perennial grass and wood waste.

Source:  http://www.ucsusa.org/assets/documents/clean_energy/ew3/corn-ethanol-and-water-quality.pdf

Some solutions offered for decreasing the Gulf Dead Zone threat

Here is an interesting video that talks about phytoplankton and its impacts on the Gulf dead zone. Phytoplankton are small organisms that provide us with almost half the oxygen we breathe. They live in the ocean and they provide other living creatures with oxygen. Since most of the Mississippi’s river areas are farmlands, and it happens every spring that these lands get fertilized with substances that it’s major components are nitrogen and phosphorous –the main nutrients polluting the ocean-. When it rains, these nutrients get rinsed into the river and eventually to the Gulf of Mexico. Phytoplankton lives on these nutrients, however, dead zone occurs there too. It’s true that Phytoplankton is an oxygen supplier, but it’s get eaten by the living creatures under water surfaces that leaves waste behind. The waste then settles into the bottom where some bacteria compose them using oxygen in the process, which result in low oxygen concentration and eventually disappearing of most of the marine animals.

A solution to that problem would be resolving the excess wash outs of fertilizers that get into the ocean. Farmers should start using winter cover crop that prevents erosion. Another solution could be using fertilizers that are friendly to the environment and lowering the amounts of the fertilizers used.



http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=1516268549653363373#editor/target=post;postID=5228216103719439857