Word: runoff
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Ocean 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...
...regime "even if it means going to war," adding that Tsvangirai would be arrested if talks fail. And that would not appear to be an idle threat: the opposition leader, who won more votes than Mugabe during the first presidential ballot on March 29 (he withdrew from the subsequent runoff in the face of a campaign of violence against his supporters), was briefly detained by Zimbabwean security forces last week...
...growing alarm that vast stretches of coastal waters are turning into dead zones - patches of seabed so depleted of oxygen that few creatures, if any, can survive there. In 2004, the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) took stock of the phenomenon - which is caused in large part by agricultural runoff - and pronounced it one of the biggest environmental problems of the 21st century. Two years later it noted that the number of identified dead zones, some of which cover thousands of square miles, had climbed from...
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...
...their first stumbling block: Weeklong talks were adjourned after the MDC rejected as "insulting" the government's offer to make opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai one of three vice presidents. (Tsvangirai won more votes than Mugabe in the first round of presidential polling on March 29; he withdrew from the runoff race in the face of a campaign of violence against opposition supporters by security forces and militias loyal to Mugabe.) An MDC source at the talks in Pretoria, South Africa, told Agence France-Presse that the government's proposal showed a "complete lack of sincerity and the need to really...