Despite Promises, Gulf Of Mexico Dead Zone Still Growing - Now Bigger Than Connecticut

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A decade ago, a team of government experts and environmental researchers banded together to tackle an alarming -- and growing -- disturbance in the Gulf of Mexico. A lifeless, oxygen-depleted band of ocean water stretching from the mouth of the Mississippi River to the Texas border had grown to more than 6,000 square miles that summer, larger than the state of Connecticut.

Four years later, their research on the Gulf "dead zone" led to an agreement among nine states, numerous federal agencies and two American Indian tribes to significantly reduce the size by 2015.

Solving the problem is a vast undertaking. Fertilizer runoff and wastewater from farms and towns upstream in the nation's heartland pour billions of pounds of excess nutrients into the Mississippi, and eventually the Gulf, each year, sparking unnatural algae blooms that choke off the oxygen supply vital for marine life. With diffuse streams and rivulets of the Mississippi draining more than 40 percent of the continental United States, pinpointing and halting the source of the dead zone has eluded policymakers over the years. And targeted federal financing to address the problem has never materialized.

Now at the halfway mark for the 2015 goal, the dead zone is still growing -- reaching nearly 8,000 square miles this year -- one of the largest recorded. The federal and state task force recently released an update to the reduction plan, calling for states along the Mississippi River to enact strict water quality standards and encouraging farmers to limit fertilizers on land near streams.

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