The recent discovery of "dead zones" in the Atlantic Ocean by a team of researchers poses several questions for the West African coastal region where many people depend on the sea for their livelihood.
Dead zones are places where life cannot exist because there is no oxygen in the water. According to a paper published in the Journal Biogeosciences, the discovery of these zones in the deep ocean was made by a team of Canadian and German marine biologists in huge whirlpools moving along the Atlantic, less than 100 kilometers from the Cape Verde archipelago, located in West Africa.
These dead zones are not a novelty in nature. Lifeless zones like this were long discovered along areas of the eastern and southern coasts of the United States and the Baltic Sea. However, this is the first time these low-oxygenated zones have been noticed in the open sea.
According to RT, these zones are very large and can sometimes measure about 100 square miles in size. They are also seasonal and travel constantly. To date, one of the biggest dead zones is formed yearly in the Gulf of Mexico.
The discovery of dead zones in West Africa is a source of worry for researchers who estimate that these dead zones may negatively affect the inhabitants of islands by stressing the ecosystem and eventually killing-off marine life.
Study author Johannes Karstensen of the University of Bremen said, "Given that the few dead zones we observe propagated less than 100 kilometers north of the Cape Verde archipelago, it is not unlikely that an open-ocean dead zone will hit the islands at some point."
"This could cause the coast to be flooded with low-oxygen water, which may put severe stress on the coastal ecosystems and may even provoke fish kills and die-off other marine life," he added