![]() sapiens must stop relying on chemical fertilizers and quit burning fossils, or the planet will not be able to sustain our species much longer.ĭon’t take it from me let the Ocean tell you!Įric Paul Roorda is editor of The Ocean Reader: History, Culture, Politics and Professor of History at Bellarmine University. The fiery eye in the Ocean over the weekend sends the same message as the other disasters that preceded it, and which will follow: We H. A freshwater example is the decrepit and accident-prone Line 5 through the Straits of Mackinac, which is facing long-overdue scrutiny and causing U.S.-Canada tensions that are ongoing at this very moment. Pipelines everywhere face the same prospect of failure. The cause of the “Eye of Fire” is unknown at this moment, but it is likely to follow the pattern of the myopic over-reach of the Deepwater Horizon operation, drilled at a depth too far. The same is true of the littoral region, where beach-walkers must beware oil blobs in the sand.Īs the nation’s terrestrial infrastructure erodes and collapses (most recently, condos in Miami not long ago, an Interstate bridge in Minneapolis), the disintegration of the subaqueous bones of the energy economy do the same. The benthic zone in the region around that catastrophe continues to suffer its consequences-weird mutations and population reduction among our crustacean friends, for instance. Now, Dead Zones are forming, or very likely will form soon, in all similar embayments around the world: The Persian Gulf, The Bay of Bengal, The Mediterranean, Black, and Yellow Seas… Also, big estuaries, where freshwater meets salt, are actively deteriorating as marine environments: The Chesapeake, San Francisco Bay, the Guayaquil River in Ecuador, the Pearl River in China…īut the “Eye of Fire” phenomenon is more closely related to a different debacle in the increasingly dystopian Gulf of Mexico: the Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010. It has grown steadily, as years of farming and lawn care keep flushing petroleum-based nitrogen products from the brown water of the rivers into the blue water of the sea. Annual inundations of fertilizer runoff from the sprawling Mississippi River watershed created the original Dead Zone. The Gulf of Mexico is where the first “Dead Zone” formed, a vast area so anaerobic that organisms other than algae cannot survive there. “The Eye of Fire” is further proof, if such were needed, that the Gulf of Mexico is a mess. But in a figurative sense, it was a deafening warning shot from the future of the Ocean. It probably hissed like a gas grill heating up for an Independence Day cookout. ![]() That is much, much longer than any fireworks spectacle, but not nearly as loud. The undersea gas line, stemming from a nearby drilling rig, operated by the national Mexican petroleum monopoly Pemex, burned for five hours.
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