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Problem Statement
Project Background and Goals
Background
The issue of focus, within the prompted topic of plankton and algae, is that of heavily polluted areas within the ocean. Pollution is the main antagonizer to plankton communities, including phytoplankton which are often described as the backbone of marine ecosystems due to their position as the bottom tier of most marine food chains. An area that our team chose to focus on is the hypoxic or dead zone within the Gulf of Mexico where pollution concentration is so high that marine life is nonexistent from about 40-50 miles off the southern coast of the United States. A hypoxic zone refers to an area with low levels of oxygen, and as most living organisms require oxygen to thrive, areas that are hypoxic are often referred to as dead zones due to a lack of life in the specified location. In the case of the Gulf of Mexico, upstream pollution from the Mississippi River due to various agricultural and industrial complexes, have contributed obscene amounts of pollutants into the gulf. Since many of these pollutants are chemicals with heavy nutrient concentrates such as phosphorus, nitrogen, and sulfates, algal blooms occur as a result of the overstimulation of nutrients. Algal blooms cause a thick layer of the algae to spread over the surface of the water, which often blocks sunlight preventing photosynthesis and thus oxygen production of marine plant life. Additionally, algae tend to soak up any residual oxygen within water to support their needs of survival, causing further hypoxification of the waters. In turn, local communities reliant on the fishing and tourism industry have been severely impacted due to migration and eradication of once local fisheries and shellfish populations as well as health hazards from the water quality during the blooming season.
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Barriers
Some requirements of a solution are that it must be feasible on a large scale or at least be scalable due to the vastness of the ocean. Another requirement is that depending on both location and the type of water body being dealt with, an adaptable solution is needed to deal with different environments, thus creating a “one-size fits all” proposal is very difficult. The temperature of the water, weather patterns, and the overall flow of human traffic through the areas are just a few of the many factors that need to be considered.
In addition to those geographical barriers, there’s also the political barriers that play a huge role in contributing to marine pollution. A large proportion of agricultural and industrial complexes that produce chemical waste, are subsidized by local and national governments, thus having huge influence in policies that would dictate their waste regulation. In the United States, the clean water act, originally published in 1972, is the governing law of maintaining clear waters and regulating pollution for all different industries and scales. However, the policy itself has come under attack several times and has been amended in both beneficial and harmful ways. Recent legislation has tried to limit what waterways would be protected under the act, and many streams and rivers that are often huge pollutant contributors flow into the ocean unregulated. Outside of the United States, many Asian countries such as India and China, have legislation so limited that companies with manufacturing plants in these locations can dump whatever waste they chose into surrounding waters. Due to the major influence in the local political scene, these companies often go unscathed despite increasing medical and health catastrophe in surrounding communities.
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Motivation
By looking at both current policies as well as solution proposals for cleaning up hypoxic zones, this team felt that the timeline for change was much too slow and the solutions relied too heavily on external forces, such as governments and private company cooperation. Policy enactment, while still necessary for further improvement in water quality and pollution control, failed to immediately address the need to clean up the areas as well as prioritize aiding those who lost their livelihoods from the declining local fishing and tourism industry. Additionally, through patent search, there was also a lack of scalable solutions to clean up an area as large as the Gulf of Mexico. As a result, our team proposes a solution that not only seeks to clean up the area of interest, but also promotes the health and economic well being of the surrounding Gulf communities (see figure for project goals).