Beware of the "Blob". It's coming to an ocean near you.

After 12 years as an organic grocer, I have probably collected 100 different reasons to buy organically.  Well now I can add yet another reason with my recent discovery of the ”Blob.”   The Blob is actually a thick, dense layer of oxygen-starved water that sits – like a blob – on the bottom of the ocean, sucking the life out of everything that enters it.   It is like the lava lamps of the 1960′s, with their melted wax bouncing up and down in the water tube and constantly changing shape.

So what does the blob have to do with a food delivery business?  Well it turns out that the blob is the direct result of conventional farmers spraying their crops with synthetic nitrogen fertilizers and phosphorus.    Over the past 60 years, the  dosage of chemcial fertilizers has increased 300%.   Here is a how a typical blob is formed:

The chemicals run off the farmland into nearby streams which eventually make their way all the way out to the ocean. There the plankton and bacteria take over.   The plankton go into a feeding frenzy from the elevated levels of nitrogen and phosphorus and start reproducing like crazy.   They then die and sink to the ocean floor where the bacteria gobble them up and go on a decomposition rampage, using up all the available oxygen in the process.  (Please forgive me if I am getting too technical – it is a curse of my undergraduate degree in environmental biology).

Normally, the ocean currents would bring a fresh supply of oxygen and solve the probem.  However, the characteristics of the blob cause it to be resistant to mixing with the surrounding water, just like the lava lamp.

Image Credit NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio

What is really scary about the blob is that there are now over 400 of them in the world’s oceans and they are getting bigger and bigger every year.  One of the largest in the world can be found every spring in the Gulf of Mexico, which receives all the agricultural runoff from the Mississippi river.   This blob is a whopping 6500 square miles, which is bigger than all of the Islands of Hawaii.

What is worse is that new, low oxygen zones are arising due to climate change and staying for months, leaving the entire area within the zone devoid of fish and causing a massive die off of crustaceans.  The one that is closest to us on the west coast is a low oxygen zone just off the northern edge of California, which first arose in 2001 and has returned every year since.

So when you get your next delivery of organic and local groceries, stop and pat yourself on the back for helping to stop the spread of the deadly blob.

If you want to learn more about the blob or about the health of our oceans in general, I highly recommend a new book called Sea Sick: The Global Ocean in Crisis.  It was written less than a year ago by Alanna Michell, who was recently named the best environmental reporter in the world by Reuters.   Just like Al Gore provided the wake up call on climate change, Alanna is sounding the alarm on the deteriorating health of our precious  oceans.