Word: nitrogenated
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Living with Dead Zones According to a report published in the journal Science, the number of dead zones--areas of the ocean with oxygen levels so low that marine life can barely survive--has doubled every 10 years since the 1960s as a result of a runoff polluted with nitrogen-rich crop fertilizer. There are now more than 400 such zones--from the Gulf of Mexico to the Black Sea (see map above)--which, the report's authors say, pose as great a threat to coastal ecosystems as overfishing and habitat loss...
Dead zones are created when excess nitrogen and other pollutants in ocean water promote large blooms of algae and phytoplankton on the surface. The nitrogen gets there in a couple of ways: through river water filled with fertilizer from farm runoff and from air polluted with tailpipe and smokestack emissions. When the algae die and sink to the ocean floor, bacteria there break them down, while consuming pretty much all of the available oxygen in the water. The bacteria also proliferate wildly, taking over the ecosystem and exacerbating the oxygen depletion. If conditions like strong currents, which are common...
...best way to prevent this from happening would be to reduce the amount of nitrogen introduced into the ocean. The technology already exists to do that. If, for example, farmers in the upper part of the U.S. were given a financial incentive to plant crops like winter wheat, rather than leaving their fields fallow after the fall harvest, says marine ecologist Robert Howarth of Cornell University, much of the nitrogenous fertilizer that would normally get washed into waterways by spring thaws could instead be absorbed into winter grain crops. Measures of this sort, if uniformly implemented, could all but eliminate...
...from the streets of the capital. During a Sino-African summit in 2006, vehicle restrictions were enacted that removed about 800,000 of Beijing's then 2.8 million cars. The restrictions, which were put in place for three days, were "remarkably successful" and led to a 40% drop in nitrogen oxides, according to a study conducted by researchers from Harvard University and the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute...
...billion to $4 billion each. Nippon Steel, Japan's largest steelmaker, introduced a type of eco-friendly coke-making technology called dry-quenching in China that has become widely used throughout the industry. It produces the coke, a form of carbon essential for making steel, by cooling it with nitrogen rather than water, which significantly reduces the amount of carbon dioxide released. The resulting steam is captured and used to produce electricity. Nippon has supplied about 30 of these systems at an estimated $20 million to $40 million each. In 2003, Nippon Steel set up a joint venture with Shougang...