WASHINGTON, July 25 (UPI) -- A huge underwater "dead zone" of oxygen-starved water in Chesapeake Bay on the U.S. East Coast is growing at an alarming rate, environmental officials say.
Officials in Virginia and Maryland say the growing dead zone is the result of unusually high levels of nutrient pollution this year, The Washington Post reported Sunday.
Covering a third of the bay, the dead zone stretched from Baltimore Harbor to the mid-channel region in the Potomac River, about 83 miles, when measured in late June, the newspaper said.
Dead zones are a yearly occurrence in the bay caused by pollution in water that runs off cities and farms, officials said.
However, heavy flows of contaminated water from the Susquehanna River dumped as much nutrient pollution into the bay by May as usually comes in an entire average year, a Maryland Department of Natural Resources researcher said.
Pollution from chemicals such as fertilizers provides a feast for bay algae, which bloom and die in a rapid cycle, pulling oxygen from the water and threatening Chesapeake Bay shad, rockfish, oysters and crabs.
"If there's not good habitat, they're stressed and they won't reproduce,'' Bruce Michael, director of the DNR's resource assessment service, said. "They're more susceptible to disease and won't eat. We want them to eat a lot of food and reproduce and grow."
