Word: gulf
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...broadest terms, the problem for the U.S. stems from rampant development along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts and the Gulf of Mexico. Between 1940 and 1980, the number of Americans who live within 50 miles of a seashore increased from 42 million to 89 million -- and the total is still mounting. Coastal waters are getting perilously close to reaching their capacity to absorb civilization's wastes...
...oceans are broadcasting an increasingly urgent SOS. Since June 1987 at least 750 dolphins have died mysteriously along the Atlantic Coast. In many that washed ashore, the snouts, flippers and tails were pocked with blisters and craters; in others, huge patches of skin had sloughed off. In the Gulf of Maine, harbor seals currently have the highest pesticide level of any U.S. mammals, on land or in water. From Portland to Morehead City, N.C., fishermen have been hauling up lobsters and crabs with gaping holes in their shells and fish with rotted fins and ulcerous lesions. Last year's oyster...
Suffocating and sometimes poisonous blooms of algae -- the so-called red and brown tides -- regularly blot the nation's coastal bays and gulfs, leaving behind a trail of dying fish and contaminated mollusks and crustaceans. Patches of water that have been almost totally depleted of oxygen, known as dead zones, are proliferating. As many as 1 million fluke and flounder were killed earlier this summer when they became trapped in anoxic water in New Jersey's Raritan Bay. Another huge dead zone, 300 miles long and ten miles wide, is adrift in the Gulf of Mexico...
...shores are also being inundated by waves of plastic debris. On the sands of the Texas Gulf Coast one day last September, volunteers collected 307 tons of litter, two-thirds of which was plastic, including 31,733 bags, 30,295 bottles and 15,631 six-pack yokes. Plastic trash is being found far out to sea. On a four-day trip from Maryland to Florida that ranged 100 miles offshore, John Hardy, an Oregon State University marine biologist, spotted "Styrofoam and other plastic on the surface, most of the whole cruise...
...study of satellite photographs has led scientists to believe that algae can be conveyed around the world on ocean currents. The Carolinas algae, which had previously been confined to the Gulf of Mexico, apparently drifted to Atlantic shores by way of the Gulf Stream. One species that is native to Southern California is thought to have been carried to Spain in the ballast water of freighters...