Nancy Rabalais’s team has been able to process some of the data and issued a press release on this year’s bottom water hypoxia. As I mentioned in the last post, the zone of hypoxia was actually two zones, which you can see below. The total estimated square mileage of bottom water at or below 2 mg/L dissolved oxygen was 5,052 square miles/14,785 square kilometers, which is almost three times larger than the goal proposed by the Mississippi River Gulf of Mexico Watershed Nutrient Task Force in 2001 and 2008.
I can provide some additional thoughts with pretty HD video to boot. The eastern stations, as seen in the chlorophyll map, were predominantly green water, with considerable phyotoplankton mass present in the water column. We could observe significant green-colored biomass both on the GF/D pre-filters and the 0.22 µm Sterivex filters. This is also what you see if you are actually in the water, and the video from the green-water CTD cast at station B6 confirms what was seen with the CTD instrumentation and the filters. Convenient, eh? There is dense, murky greenness at the surface. Deeper, the visibility improves as we get below the highest biomass concentration, but towards the bottom, where hypoxia was observed, we again see increased turbidity, but of a different sort. It’s much whiter than that at the surface. On the return trip, considerable marine snow can be seen (along with a jelly or two and other marine invertebrates).
The western stations, as you might imagine by looking at the surface chlorophyll data, were blue water, with very little phyotplankton mass compared to the eastern stations. The cast at station K3 shows beautiful blue water with high visibility (diver’s paradise), but as you descend, you again pick up the whitish turbidity at the bottom layer where hypoxia was observed.
Sterivex filters from this section were light pink, a phenomenon we observed last year as well. The 16S rRNA and metagenomic data will, among other things, help us uncover a bit more about the variant prokaryotic taxa seen in these contrasting zones of hypoxia.