Dr. Mike Roman of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science talks about the growing concern surrounding the Chesapeake Bay's dead zones. (News21 photo by Jason Lenhart)

The Chesapeake Bay dead zone, an area so devoid of oxygen that nothing can survive there, now stretches 90 to 125 miles long and six miles wide every summer, said Dr. Mike Roman, lab director at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. That comes to about 10 percent to 15 percent of the total volume of water in the bay.

Although shimmering and beautiful on the surface, “the water is more like pea soup,” Roman told News21.

Of the 10 most important commercial species of fish and shellfish in the bay, only crabs can tolerate these dead-zone conditions for short periods.

“Everything else dies or escapes,” said Yun Li, a UMCES graduate research assistant who specializes in physical oceanography modeling.

Nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorous as well as sediment that flush into the bay every year with spring and summer rains are feeding huge algae blooms that eventually suck all the oxygen out of the water, Roman said.

“That’s why we have to reduce the nitrogen and phosphorous” pouring into the bay, Roman said. Nitrogen, phosphorous and sediment are endemic to agricultural and storm water runoff that seep into rivers feeding into the bay from New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, Virginia and D.C.

Since passage of the 1977 Clean Water Act, the Environmental Protection Agency has worked to regulate discharges of pollutants into the waters, control the flow of those nutrients and improve the quality of waters across the United States, including the Chesapeake.

Roman has been studying the levels of dissolved oxygen in the both the Chesapeake Bay and the northern Gulf of Mexico for years and is one of the scientists heading down to the Gulf to analyze the water quality this summer.

About 50 percent of the nutrient-rich runoff pouring into the Chesapeake Bay comes from the Susquehanna, a river that starts in New York and runs through the Appalachian Mountains and farmland in Pennsylvania.

--By Sharon Behn