"The massive amount of nutrient-heavy river water pouring out of spillways and through the mouths of the Mississippi and Atchafalaya rivers will likely trigger a record-setting Gulf of Mexico dead zone, an area of low-to-no oxygen water that forms annually off Louisiana’s coast."
"Nonpoint" sources of water pollution worry officials. When rain falls or snow melts, the runoff can pick up fertilizers and pesticides from agricultural fields, sediments from construction sites, engine oil from city parking lots, germ-laden dog poop from curbside, etc.
"Since the first plea for help came over a Keys radio station, hundreds of volunteers have worked around the clock to save pilot whales that mysteriously stranded themselves in shallow waters."
"Radiation has contaminated the underground pipes, water tanks, and plumbing that provide drinking water for much of Central Texas and the famed Texas Hill Country, according to concerned city officials in the region who have tested the pipes with Geiger counters."
"An old compact may not be enough to keep the Tongue River from running dry."
"For the second time in six years, the Washington, D.C.-based conservation group American Rivers today put the Susquehanna at the top of its annual 'Endangered Rivers' list, citing rapidly growing and 'poorly regulated' natural gas drilling using hydraulic fracturing, or 'fracking.'"
"The Obama administration is ordering an ambitious cleanup of the Chicago River, a dramatic step toward improving an urban waterway treated for more than a century as little more than an industrialized sewage canal."
The event will cover everything from the Gulf of Mexico's struggle to recover from the BP oil spill to protection of over-exploited commercial fish stocks … to ocean acidification, marine protected areas, offshore energy, and coastal ecosystem restoration.
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