According to The New York Times, piles of dead fish were spotted covering the edge of the beach, during what wildlife officials described as a “low dissolved oxygen event”.
It was a “perfect storm” of poor conditions, said Brian Frazier, director of the Bazuria County Parks Department.
The official explained that the warm water contains much less oxygen than the cold water, and that the calm seas and cloudy skies in the region have hampered the normal methods of pumping oxygen into the seawater. (…) waves add oxygen to water, and clouds in the sky reduce the ability of microorganisms to produce oxygen through photosynthesis, he said.
For her part, Katie St. Clair, director of marine life at the University of Texas, said warming Gulf Coast waters from climate change could have contributed to fish kills.
“As the water temperature increases, it could certainly lead to more of these events, especially in our shallow, coastal or terrestrial environments,” she added.
The National Weather Service recorded a high of 92 degrees Celsius in Brazoria province on Friday, the day it was first reported that dead fish washed up on the beach.
The phenomenon of fish kills
And the director of the Arizona Department of Parks pointed out that the death of these fish is “not uncommon” in the region and begins to occur when the water temperature increases during the summer.
“It’s a little worrying to see a wave of dead fish wash ashore,” Frazier said. But he added that local water conditions will improve as ocean waves add oxygen back into the water and fish move away from low oxygen areas.
Low oxygen levels
A 2019 United Nations report concluded that warming ocean waters have led to increased incidences of “hypoxia” – or reduced oxygen levels – in coastal waters, threatening fish populations. One of the report’s authors said at the time that the loss of oxygen and other effects of global warming would “create enormous pressure” on the Gulf Coast region in the future. In addition to localized hypoxia, a large “dead zone” of water spanning thousands of square miles is known to form in the Gulf of Mexico during the summer months.
Read the Latest World News Today on The Eastern Herald.
