Mississippi River Research Paper

Words: 509
Pages: 3

Since the day that Thomas Jefferson bought the Louisiana Purchase from France in 1803 people started to spread to the Mid-West, settle, and set up their own farms, towns, and some cities. . The dead zone in the Mississippi River and Gulf of Mexico cause organisms to die and allow algal blooms and nutrients to overload because of the massive amounts nitrogen and phosphorous. The way this can be regulated is by using less fertilizer, control animal wastes, and monitoring of the septic systems and sewage treatment. At least half of the oxygen that we breathe comes from tiny organisms that live in the ocean. These microscopic marine phytoplankton produce oxygen just like plants but phytoplankton are not plants they’re protists, single celled organisms. To grow and reproduce phytoplankton depend on nutrients in the water of proper temperature and just the right light conditions. Coastal areas are extremely rich in nutrients that have washed off the land into the rivers and down to the sea. Areas of open ocean have a lower concentration of phytoplankton because of fewer nutrients can be found there. …show more content…
41% of the United States drains into the Mississippi river then out into the Gulf of Mexico, that’s a total of 3,200,000 km² of land or about 600 million football fields. About 12 million people live in urban areas that border the Mississippi, all of those people constantly discharge treated sewage into the rivers, however the majority of the land in the Mississippi’s watershed is farmland. Each spring as farmers fertilize their lands preparing for crop season, rain washes fertilizer off the land and ultimately down into the ocean. All the urban and farm discharges include nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus that are very important for the growth of phytoplankton. Incredibly about 1.7 million tons of these nutrients are dumped into the Gulf of Mexico every