The Dead Zone

Hypoxic "Dead Zone" Found 20 Miles Off Galveston

"It's the widest hypoxic region we have ever observed off Texas," said Steve DiMarco. "It extends 20 miles off the Galveston coast."

"As our data shows, hypoxic formation in the northern Gulf of Mexico is not a simple problem and is more complex than many have believed."


Yet another prediction of mine has come true. I suppose BP and Soetoro will attempt to conceal this as well and say that it is due to global warming, and that we must have a carbon tax or we will all asphyxiate. No, I told you all that the methane and the Corexit and the byproducts of the chemical reactions between oil and BP's dispersant would do just this. And it's not just in the water that oxygen levels have dropped, though that is all that this Texas A&M research team was measuring. The air is affected as well.

Slightly lower levels of oxygen aren't terribly debilitating for people and larger animals -- after all, they play football at Mile High Stadium in Denver and people can hike very tall mountains without oxygen tanks. But this is a very serious problem because it disproportionately affects microbes and very small animal life.

There is a link on the Drudge Report to another story from A&M's Geosciences department stating that methane levels have been measured one million times higher than normal, and that these are "levels only seen during mass extinction events." Unfortunately, the link is dead. Either A&M took their article down because their servers are not capable of handling traffic of the magnitude that a link on Drudge would generate or... You fill in the blank.

But I've been writing for weeks about elevated levels of methane, benzene and other toxins, hundreds of times higher than the government's maximum safe levels. Now we are talking in the millions. But still there is a total media blackout on the subject of poison in the air, hypoxia in the water and the acute risk to the public and to animal and plant life. And now the threat has come to Texas, even though our state and local officials are insisting that no oil is washing up, even though that has been reported in the media, and that the beaches are safe.

The "dead zone" might be 20 miles offshore at this point, but I'm not going anywhere near the coast.