According to the Toronto Star, ‘dead zones’ with too little oxygen for life are expanding in the world’s oceans. There are now more than 400 of them around the world, double what the UN reported just two years ago.

The newest dead areas are being found in the Southern Hemisphere – South America, Africa, parts of Asia…Some of the increase is due to the discovery of low-oxygen areas that may have existed for years and are just being found, he said, but others are actually newly developed. Pollution-fed algae, which deprive other living marine life of oxygen, is the cause of most of the world’s dead zones. Scientists mainly blame fertilizer and other farm run-off, sewage and fossil-fuel burning.

What lovely news.