Last year it reached 7,903 square miles. The earlier record was 8,481 square miles in 2002.

Notice a trend?

Notice the Bizarre-New-Age-of-Abysmal-Record-Everythings we've entered?

For those of you who've been asleep during the Bush-van-Winkle years, here's the primer. A dead zone forms when fertilizers wash from farms via rivers to fertilize the sea.

There are other reasons too. Including whatever nutrients you add to your lawn. Don't even get me started on golf courses.

So this year's climate-change-induced record floods on the Mississippi River do a lot more damage than to Midwestern croplands.

That's because the ocean doesn't like a lot of fertilizer. It makes too many plants grow. Those plants die and feed too many decomposers who use up all the oxygen in the water. Everything suffocates.

Dead zone. Coming soon to a seashore near you.

Julia Whitty is Mother Jones' environmental correspondent, lecturer, and 2008 winner of the Kiriyama Prize and the John Burroughs Medal Award.

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Julia Whitty

Environmental Correspondent

Julia Whitty is the environmental correspondent for Mother Jones. Her latest book is Deep Blue Home: An Intimate Ecology of Our Wild Ocean. For more of her stories, click here. RSS | Twitter