The Gulf of Mexico is over 500 miles south of Illinois, but we are very much connected to the Gulf via our rivers and streams. Most of Illinois’ waterways eventually reach the Mississippi River, which drains into the Gulf of Mexico near New Orleans. Therefore, pollution that originates in Illinois eventually winds up polluting the nation’s second longest river and the source of a lot of our seafood.

Pollution from Illinois and other states in the Mississippi River Basin has been linked with an area within the Gulf of Mexico known as the Dead Zone. The Dead Zone forms every summer off the coast of Louisiana, and averages 5,000 square miles.

For more information, visit our Gulf of Mexico Dead Zone page.

For Immediate Release
July 30 , 2007

Champaign, IL – A team of researchers just finished mapping the size of the “Dead Zone” in the northern Gulf of Mexico, and at 7900 mi2, it is the third largest since monitoring began in 1985.  The Dead Zone is an area of hypoxic water that forms every summer along the Gulf Coast and robs ocean life of oxygen.  Species that cannot escape the hypoxia may perish, and those able to migrate may have to swim outside of the Dead Zone to survive.   

The Gulf of Mexico Dead Zone is of enough concern to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that an independent team of scientists was assembled to study the causes and nature of the hypoxia.  The team, known as the Science Advisory Board Hypoxia Advisory Panel, recently released a second draft of their report. {Continue Reading »}

For Immediate Release
April 20th, 2004

Ocean policy report identifies pollution from inland states as significant problem.

(Washington D.C.) The U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy, a congressionally established 16-member panel tasked with studying the status of and threats facing the nation’s oceans, today provided its comprehensive report based on two years of work to governors and members of Congress. It represents the first Congressionally-mandated review of our national ocean policy in more than 30 years and includes recommendations for a coordinated and comprehensive national ocean policy.

The report is the second of two high-level ocean studies to appear in the past twelve months, and the U.S. Commission study arrived at the same major findings as the independently established Pew Oceans Commission did last year: Overfishing, pollution, coastal development, habitat destruction and mismanagement are leading to the decline of ocean wildlife and the collapse of entire ocean ecosystems. Key among the findings were the impact that nutrient pollution, much of it coming from inland states, is having on the marine ecosystem. {Continue Reading »}

Recommendations for Curbing Agricultural Runoff Recognize that America’s Oceans Start Here

Champaign, June 4: After conducting the first national review of US ocean policies in more than 30 years, the Pew Ocean Commission released its findings today, outlining a new national agenda for restoring the nation’s oceans. The Commission, which was funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts and chaired by former Congressman and White House Chief of Staff Leon Panetta, spent three years traveling the country to learn about challenges facing the country’s oceans and formulating recommendations for addressing them.

While overfishing of the nation’s fish stocks was identified as the most obvious impact on the marine environment, the Commission found that the greatest pollution threat to coastal marine life if the runoff from excess nitrogen from fertilized farm fields, animal feed lots, and urban areas, including those found far, far away from the coasts. Excess amounts of these nutrients cause massive algal blooms that deplete oxygen in the ocean and cause huge hypoxic zones, or “Dead Zones”, such as the one in the Gulf of Mexico which was the size of the State of Massachusetts in the summer of 2002, and where little or no marine life can survive. {Continue Reading »}