The Slow Suffocation: How Fertilizer Runoff Creates Ocean Dead Zones

Patricio wrote:... it happens in the Gulf of America every summer. The phosphorus and nitrogen that grows American corn washes down the Mississippi River and suffocates everything at the bottom of the gulf.

Patricio wrote: It's gradual, not sudden, without fanfare or drama,

Patricio wrote: ... the sea is simply depleted of it's oxygen.

Patricio wrote: If you're a fish, you either get the hell out of the neighborhood or you die.

Patricio wrote: The chain begins on land.

Patricio wrote: Modern industrial agriculture applies fertilizer at scales the soil cannot fully absorb.

Patricio wrote:
One might say it's rather brutal and ironic that it happens in the Gulf of Mexico (sorry Trump, it's not the Gulf of America), every summer. The phosphorus and nitrogen that grows American corn washes down the Mississippi River and suffocates everything at the bottom of the gulf. It's gradual, not sudden, without fanfare or drama, the sea is simply depleted of it's oxygen. If you're a fish, you either get the hell out of the neighborhood or you die.

This is called eutrophication--a 90 cent word where no 10 cent word will do, from the Greek meaning 'well-nourished." In a word, you overfeed the ocean, you starve it. Did I mention irony?

The chain begins on land. Modern industrial agriculture applies fertilizer at scales the soil cannot fully absorb. Rain carries the surplus--nitrogen in its nitrate form, phosphorus bound to soil particles--across fields, into drainage ditches, into rivers. The Mississippi basin alone drains 41 percent of the contiguous United States. Every tributary is a delivery mechanism, and what it delivers, ultimately, is a nutrient pulse to coastal waters that have no evolutionary preparation for it.

The bloom is the first act. When that pulse of nitrogen and phosphorus reaches sunlit shallow water, phytoplankton respond the only way they know how: they multiply. A bloom can double its biomass in a day. The surface turns green, then brown, then a color that has no pleasant name. Sunlight that once penetrated to underwater grasses now stops at the surface. The grasses die. The habitat they provided disappears.

The bloom's death is the second act--and the lethal one. Algae do not live long. When the bloom crashes, billions of cells sink toward the seafloor, carrying with them the full caloric weight of their brief lives. Bacteria feast on the organic matter. Bacteria, like all aerobic organisms, consume oxygen as they work. In the water column above the seafloor, that oxygen is not easily replaced--stratification, driven by the warmer, fresher surface water sitting atop denser saltwater, prevents mixing. The oxygen simply gets eaten and is not replenished.

The result is hypoxia: dissolved oxygen levels below 2 milligrams per liter, the threshold below which most marine life cannot function. Shrimp and fish flee if they can detect the boundary in time. Crabs, worms, and bottom-dwelling organisms that cannot flee die in place. The seafloor becomes a killing floor--not from poison, not from heat, but from the simple arithmetic of oxygen consumed faster than it can be restored.

The Gulf of Mexico dead zone has become an annual fixture. It forms each spring as snowmelt and spring rains drain the Corn Belt southward, peaks in summer when stratification is strongest, and partially recovers in the fall when storms mix the water column. At its largest, measured in 2017, it covered roughly 8,800 square miles--larger than New Jersey. It is not unique: the Chesapeake Bay, the Baltic Sea, the Black Sea, and more than 400 other coastal systems worldwide show similar patterns. The number has roughly doubled every decade since the 1960s.

The mechanism is not complicated, which makes the persistence of the problem damning. We know what causes dead zones. We know where the nitrogen comes from. We know which rivers carry it and roughly how much. The scientific literature on eutrophication is decades old, the biochemistry settled. What is not settled is the political economy of changing how 330 million acres of American farmland are fertilized, drained, and managed.

Nitrogen is cheap. The consequences of its overuse are externalized--borne by shrimpers in Louisiana, by the coral that cannot reestablish itself in low-oxygen water, by the ecosystems that took millennia to develop and can be functionally destroyed in a season. The fertilizer bag on the field and the dead fish on the seafloor are connected by a logic so clear it can be drawn in a diagram. Closing the distance between those two facts--the application and the consequence--is the work that remains.

References:
Rabalais, N. N., Turner, R. E., & Wiseman, W. J. (2001). Hypoxia in the Gulf of Mexico. Journal of Environmental Quality, 30(2), 320–329. https://doi.org/10.2134/jeq2001.302320x

Diaz, R. J., & Rosenberg, R. (2008). Spreading dead zones and consequences for marine ecosystems. Science, 321(5891), 926–929. https://sciences.ucf.edu/biology/d4lab/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/08/Diaz-Rosenberg-2008.pdf

NOAA. (2017). Gulf of Mexico 'dead zone' is the largest ever measured. https://www.noaa.gov/media-release/gulf-of-mexico-dead-zone-is-largest-ever-measured

sealover wrote:

Patricio wrote:
One might say it's rather brutal and ironic that it happens in the Gulf of Mexico (sorry Trump, it's not the Gulf of America), every summer. The phosphorus and nitrogen that grows American corn washes down the Mississippi River and suffocates everything at the bottom of the gulf. It's gradual, not sudden, without fanfare or drama, the sea is simply depleted of it's oxygen. If you're a fish, you either get the hell out of the neighborhood or you die.

This is called eutrophication--a 90 cent word where no 10 cent word will do, from the Greek meaning 'well-nourished." In a word, you overfeed the ocean, you starve it. Did I mention irony?

The chain begins on land. Modern industrial agriculture applies fertilizer at scales the soil cannot fully absorb. Rain carries the surplus--nitrogen in its nitrate form, phosphorus bound to soil particles--across fields, into drainage ditches, into rivers. The Mississippi basin alone drains 41 percent of the contiguous United States. Every tributary is a delivery mechanism, and what it delivers, ultimately, is a nutrient pulse to coastal waters that have no evolutionary preparation for it.

The bloom is the first act. When that pulse of nitrogen and phosphorus reaches sunlit shallow water, phytoplankton respond the only way they know how: they multiply. A bloom can double its biomass in a day. The surface turns green, then brown, then a color that has no pleasant name. Sunlight that once penetrated to underwater grasses now stops at the surface. The grasses die. The habitat they provided disappears.

The bloom's death is the second act--and the lethal one. Algae do not live long. When the bloom crashes, billions of cells sink toward the seafloor, carrying with them the full caloric weight of their brief lives. Bacteria feast on the organic matter. Bacteria, like all aerobic organisms, consume oxygen as they work. In the water column above the seafloor, that oxygen is not easily replaced--stratification, driven by the warmer, fresher surface water sitting atop denser saltwater, prevents mixing. The oxygen simply gets eaten and is not replenished.

The result is hypoxia: dissolved oxygen levels below 2 milligrams per liter, the threshold below which most marine life cannot function. Shrimp and fish flee if they can detect the boundary in time. Crabs, worms, and bottom-dwelling organisms that cannot flee die in place. The seafloor becomes a killing floor--not from poison, not from heat, but from the simple arithmetic of oxygen consumed faster than it can be restored.

The Gulf of Mexico dead zone has become an annual fixture. It forms each spring as snowmelt and spring rains drain the Corn Belt southward, peaks in summer when stratification is strongest, and partially recovers in the fall when storms mix the water column. At its largest, measured in 2017, it covered roughly 8,800 square miles--larger than New Jersey. It is not unique: the Chesapeake Bay, the Baltic Sea, the Black Sea, and more than 400 other coastal systems worldwide show similar patterns. The number has roughly doubled every decade since the 1960s.

The mechanism is not complicated, which makes the persistence of the problem damning. We know what causes dead zones. We know where the nitrogen comes from. We know which rivers carry it and roughly how much. The scientific literature on eutrophication is decades old, the biochemistry settled. What is not settled is the political economy of changing how 330 million acres of American farmland are fertilized, drained, and managed.

Nitrogen is cheap. The consequences of its overuse are externalized--borne by shrimpers in Louisiana, by the coral that cannot reestablish itself in low-oxygen water, by the ecosystems that took millennia to develop and can be functionally destroyed in a season. The fertilizer bag on the field and the dead fish on the seafloor are connected by a logic so clear it can be drawn in a diagram. Closing the distance between those two facts--the application and the consequence--is the work that remains.

References:
Rabalais, N. N., Turner, R. E., & Wiseman, W. J. (2001). Hypoxia in the Gulf of Mexico. Journal of Environmental Quality, 30(2), 320–329. https://doi.org/10.2134/jeq2001.302320x

Diaz, R. J., & Rosenberg, R. (2008). Spreading dead zones and consequences for marine ecosystems. Science, 321(5891), 926–929. https://sciences.ucf.edu/biology/d4lab/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/08/Diaz-Rosenberg-2008.pdf

NOAA. (2017). Gulf of Mexico 'dead zone' is the largest ever measured. https://www.noaa.gov/media-release/gulf-of-mexico-dead-zone-is-largest-ever-measured

Nitrogen fertilizer used to be so cheap, it was foolish not to overapply.

Absolute maximum yield can be all that prevents bankruptcy, and overapplication of nitrogen fertilizer was cheap insurance.

My favorite eutrophication story stars myself as the guy who figured out that we needed to collect rock samples from the Mother Lode and measure their nitrogen content. I can pull up the "Rush Limbaugh..." thread for it.

Going back to a simpler time, the 1970s, eutrophication was a simpler problem. People wanted their white laundry to be "whiter than white", and phosphates added to detergent could give them that. The clothes weren't any cleaner, but the way phosphorus catches ultraviolet and glows white really did make the laundry appear "whiter than white". And phosphorus is the next most limiting nutrient after nitrogen in most ecosystems. Phosphorus is MORE limiting than nitrogen in some ecosystems. Phosphates in the detergents made good fertilizer for algae blooms.

When that first "Earth Day" happened in the spring of 1970, almost nobody realized we needed to be concerned about acidic deposition ("acid rain"), ozone layer thinning, or extreme weather. Global warming from greenhouse effect was a theoretical concern, but not expected to become a problem for decades.

What the hippies DID know in 1970 was that we needed to take the phosphates out of the detergent, the lead out of the gasoline, and the DDT out of the raptor's food chain. Eutrophication from excessive use of nitrogen fertilizer wasn't recognized as a problem because it hadn't yet become one.

The "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico didn't start showing up until 1972. That year was the first time it was observed and recorded, two years too late to have been on the list of "Earth Day" concerns in 1970. There is no doubt whatsoever as to exactly what causes it.

It is tempting to blame the farmer. However, many farmers actually had conditions attached to their loans that required maximum yield measures, including deliberate over application of nitrogen fertilizer. But it was cheap enough to represent a very good investment. There were concrete benefits and no penalties for adverse impacts.

One way it came back to haunt us was by getting into the drinking water supply in farmland groundwater. "Blue baby syndrome" and I'll probably have to either look it up or just spell it wrong. Methenoglobinemia actually killed some babies in my home town, out at the migrant farm worker barracks where they drew water from a shallow well. They started testing all the water for nitrates. They even set standards for maximum allowable nitrates in drinking water, which they had to keep increasing to avoid having to shut down more wells. They even threatened to penalize farmers for contaminating wells with nitrates.

Another way it came back to haunt us was through nitrous oxide emissions as excess nitrogen fertilizer often got DENITRIFIED to dinitrogen gas, N2, along with by product nitrous oxide.

IBdaMann introduced himself to me at this website by posting the abstract of an EXCELLENT review paper about submarine groundwater discharge (SGD). He thought he was "debunking" my claims that carbonate ions in SGD were the major source of alkalinity entering the sea to counter all the "carbonic acid gas" (that's what chemists called CO2 two hundred years ago) entering the sea from the atmosphere.

That review paper by Moore et al reviewed SGD data from many studies. Unfortunately, alkalinity was one parameter they did NOT include. But it showed something fascinating to me, personally. They found almost no nitrate in SGD. Nitrogen was either in the form of ammonium or dissolved organic nitrogen. The authors noted that dissolved organic nitrogen was an important vehicle of nitrogen transport not accounted for in most investigations. IBdaMann thought this meant they were invoking "dead zones" and the whole paper was a LIE with a political agenda.. I should pull it up. His political analysis of the paper is funny. But they followed up on my OWN discovery that dissolved organic nitrogen NEEDED to be included in investigations (Nature, 1995, volume 377, pages 227-229). Whereas I showed it to be the most important vehicle of nitrogen movement in soil and groundwater of our forest study site, Moore compiled data from others showing it was an important vehicle of nitrogen transport in submarine groundwater discharge to marine ecosystems.

But no coastal wetland is putting out enough dissolved organic nitrogen in submarine groundwater discharge to cause a "dead zone" in any sea.

On the other hand, the massive fish kills in the reservoirs of the Mokolumne River, occurring precisely at the base of the Mother Lode of California Gold Rush fame, were not from agricultural nitrogen causing eutrophication. I'm proud as hell to be the one who discovered that it was nitrogen from the bedrock. (Nature, 1998, volume 395, pages 785-788).

I also got to help solve the problem, or at least try. Some aerospace engineers contracted me to help develop a soil sensor for variable rate application of nitrogen fertilizer, among other soil amendments. Near infrared reflectance spectroscopy made it possible to instantaneously determine how much bioavailable nitrogen was in the soil, so only the minimum amount required could be added according to the needs of every microsite. "Farming by the foot". Only a small minority of any field actually needed the highest rate to get maximum yield. The rest of the field was routinely over fertilized.

Patricio, you will get nothing but useless heckling from IBdaMann or Into the Night about this subject.

On the other hand, I am actually a recognized expert in this field of science, whose original discoveries about it got published in the journal NATURE.

I'm not trying to rain on your parade, Patricio

A LOT of progress has been made in variable rate agriculture, to ensure that only the parts of the field that truly NEED high N application are getting it.

Oh, and that excellent review paper by Moore et al that IBdaMann found to "debunk" my claims about alkalinity in submarine groundwater discharge ALSO notes that organic phosphorus is an important vehicle of nutrient transport. All those studies that only measured inorganic forms of N and P were missing a big part of the nutrient fluxes.

Patricio wrote:

sealover wrote:

Patricio wrote:
One might say it's rather brutal and ironic that it happens in the Gulf of Mexico (sorry Trump, it's not the Gulf of America), every summer. The phosphorus and nitrogen that grows American corn washes down the Mississippi River and suffocates everything at the bottom of the gulf. It's gradual, not sudden, without fanfare or drama, the sea is simply depleted of it's oxygen. If you're a fish, you either get the hell out of the neighborhood or you die.

This is called eutrophication--a 90 cent word where no 10 cent word will do, from the Greek meaning 'well-nourished." In a word, you overfeed the ocean, you starve it. Did I mention irony?

The chain begins on land. Modern industrial agriculture applies fertilizer at scales the soil cannot fully absorb. Rain carries the surplus--nitrogen in its nitrate form, phosphorus bound to soil particles--across fields, into drainage ditches, into rivers. The Mississippi basin alone drains 41 percent of the contiguous United States. Every tributary is a delivery mechanism, and what it delivers, ultimately, is a nutrient pulse to coastal waters that have no evolutionary preparation for it.

The bloom is the first act. When that pulse of nitrogen and phosphorus reaches sunlit shallow water, phytoplankton respond the only way they know how: they multiply. A bloom can double its biomass in a day. The surface turns green, then brown, then a color that has no pleasant name. Sunlight that once penetrated to underwater grasses now stops at the surface. The grasses die. The habitat they provided disappears.

The bloom's death is the second act--and the lethal one. Algae do not live long. When the bloom crashes, billions of cells sink toward the seafloor, carrying with them the full caloric weight of their brief lives. Bacteria feast on the organic matter. Bacteria, like all aerobic organisms, consume oxygen as they work. In the water column above the seafloor, that oxygen is not easily replaced--stratification, driven by the warmer, fresher surface water sitting atop denser saltwater, prevents mixing. The oxygen simply gets eaten and is not replenished.

The result is hypoxia: dissolved oxygen levels below 2 milligrams per liter, the threshold below which most marine life cannot function. Shrimp and fish flee if they can detect the boundary in time. Crabs, worms, and bottom-dwelling organisms that cannot flee die in place. The seafloor becomes a killing floor--not from poison, not from heat, but from the simple arithmetic of oxygen consumed faster than it can be restored.

The Gulf of Mexico dead zone has become an annual fixture. It forms each spring as snowmelt and spring rains drain the Corn Belt southward, peaks in summer when stratification is strongest, and partially recovers in the fall when storms mix the water column. At its largest, measured in 2017, it covered roughly 8,800 square miles--larger than New Jersey. It is not unique: the Chesapeake Bay, the Baltic Sea, the Black Sea, and more than 400 other coastal systems worldwide show similar patterns. The number has roughly doubled every decade since the 1960s.

The mechanism is not complicated, which makes the persistence of the problem damning. We know what causes dead zones. We know where the nitrogen comes from. We know which rivers carry it and roughly how much. The scientific literature on eutrophication is decades old, the biochemistry settled. What is not settled is the political economy of changing how 330 million acres of American farmland are fertilized, drained, and managed.

Nitrogen is cheap. The consequences of its overuse are externalized--borne by shrimpers in Louisiana, by the coral that cannot reestablish itself in low-oxygen water, by the ecosystems that took millennia to develop and can be functionally destroyed in a season. The fertilizer bag on the field and the dead fish on the seafloor are connected by a logic so clear it can be drawn in a diagram. Closing the distance between those two facts--the application and the consequence--is the work that remains.

References:
Rabalais, N. N., Turner, R. E., & Wiseman, W. J. (2001). Hypoxia in the Gulf of Mexico. Journal of Environmental Quality, 30(2), 320–329. https://doi.org/10.2134/jeq2001.302320x

Diaz, R. J., & Rosenberg, R. (2008). Spreading dead zones and consequences for marine ecosystems. Science, 321(5891), 926–929. https://sciences.ucf.edu/biology/d4lab/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/08/Diaz-Rosenberg-2008.pdf

NOAA. (2017). Gulf of Mexico 'dead zone' is the largest ever measured. https://www.noaa.gov/media-release/gulf-of-mexico-dead-zone-is-largest-ever-measured

Nitrogen fertilizer used to be so cheap, it was foolish not to overapply.

Absolute maximum yield can be all that prevents bankruptcy, and overapplication of nitrogen fertilizer was cheap insurance.

My favorite eutrophication story stars myself as the guy who figured out that we needed to collect rock samples from the Mother Lode and measure their nitrogen content. I can pull up the "Rush Limbaugh..." thread for it.

Going back to a simpler time, the 1970s, eutrophication was a simpler problem. People wanted their white laundry to be "whiter than white", and phosphates added to detergent could give them that. The clothes weren't any cleaner, but the way phosphorus catches ultraviolet and glows white really did make the laundry appear "whiter than white". And phosphorus is the next most limiting nutrient after nitrogen in most ecosystems. Phosphorus is MORE limiting than nitrogen in some ecosystems. Phosphates in the detergents made good fertilizer for algae blooms.

When that first "Earth Day" happened in the spring of 1970, almost nobody realized we needed to be concerned about acidic deposition ("acid rain"), ozone layer thinning, or extreme weather. Global warming from greenhouse effect was a theoretical concern, but not expected to become a problem for decades.

What the hippies DID know in 1970 was that we needed to take the phosphates out of the detergent, the lead out of the gasoline, and the DDT out of the raptor's food chain. Eutrophication from excessive use of nitrogen fertilizer wasn't recognized as a problem because it hadn't yet become one.

The "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico didn't start showing up until 1972. That year was the first time it was observed and recorded, two years too late to have been on the list of "Earth Day" concerns in 1970. There is no doubt whatsoever as to exactly what causes it.

It is tempting to blame the farmer. However, many farmers actually had conditions attached to their loans that required maximum yield measures, including deliberate over application of nitrogen fertilizer. But it was cheap enough to represent a very good investment. There were concrete benefits and no penalties for adverse impacts.

One way it came back to haunt us was by getting into the drinking water supply in farmland groundwater. "Blue baby syndrome" and I'll probably have to either look it up or just spell it wrong. Methenoglobinemia actually killed some babies in my home town, out at the migrant farm worker barracks where they drew water from a shallow well. They started testing all the water for nitrates. They even set standards for maximum allowable nitrates in drinking water, which they had to keep increasing to avoid having to shut down more wells. They even threatened to penalize farmers for contaminating wells with nitrates.

Another way it came back to haunt us was through nitrous oxide emissions as excess nitrogen fertilizer often got DENITRIFIED to dinitrogen gas, N2, along with by product nitrous oxide.

IBdaMann introduced himself to me at this website by posting the abstract of an EXCELLENT review paper about submarine groundwater discharge (SGD). He thought he was "debunking" my claims that carbonate ions in SGD were the major source of alkalinity entering the sea to counter all the "carbonic acid gas" (that's what chemists called CO2 two hundred years ago) entering the sea from the atmosphere.

That review paper by Moore et al reviewed SGD data from many studies. Unfortunately, alkalinity was one parameter they did NOT include. But it showed something fascinating to me, personally. They found almost no nitrate in SGD. Nitrogen was either in the form of ammonium or dissolved organic nitrogen. The authors noted that dissolved organic nitrogen was an important vehicle of nitrogen transport not accounted for in most investigations. IBdaMann thought this meant they were invoking "dead zones" and the whole paper was a LIE with a political agenda.. I should pull it up. His political analysis of the paper is funny. But they followed up on my OWN discovery that dissolved organic nitrogen NEEDED to be included in investigations (Nature, 1995, volume 377, pages 227-229). Whereas I showed it to be the most important vehicle of nitrogen movement in soil and groundwater of our forest study site, Moore compiled data from others showing it was an important vehicle of nitrogen transport in submarine groundwater discharge to marine ecosystems.

But no coastal wetland is putting out enough dissolved organic nitrogen in submarine groundwater discharge to cause a "dead zone" in any sea.

On the other hand, the massive fish kills in the reservoirs of the Mokolumne River, occurring precisely at the base of the Mother Lode of California Gold Rush fame, were not from agricultural nitrogen causing eutrophication. I'm proud as hell to be the one who discovered that it was nitrogen from the bedrock. (Nature, 1998, volume 395, pages 785-788).

I also got to help solve the problem, or at least try. Some aerospace engineers contracted me to help develop a soil sensor for variable rate application of nitrogen fertilizer, among other soil amendments. Near infrared reflectance spectroscopy made it possible to instantaneously determine how much bioavailable nitrogen was in the soil, so only the minimum amount required could be added according to the needs of every microsite. "Farming by the foot". Only a small minority of any field actually needed the highest rate to get maximum yield. The rest of the field was routinely over fertilized.

Patricio, you will get nothing but useless heckling from IBdaMann or Into the Night about this subject.

On the other hand, I am actually a recognized expert in this field of science, whose original discoveries about it got published in the journal NATURE.

I'm not trying to rain on your parade, Patricio

A LOT of progress has been made in variable rate agriculture, to ensure that only the parts of the field that truly NEED high N application are getting it.

Oh, and that excellent review paper by Moore et al that IBdaMann found to "debunk" my claims about alkalinity in submarine groundwater discharge ALSO notes that organic phosphorus is an important vehicle of nutrient transport. All those studies that only measured inorganic forms of N and P were missing a big part of the nutrient fluxes.

Patricio replies

Well, Sealover, once upon a time (and I still have long hair) I was a 'hippie', though I was always more into jazz than rock and only took LSD three times

. Anyway, love the history/memory lane, acid rain, etc., and genuine respect for what you've actually accomplished in this field.

The "farming by the foot" detail reframes the whole issue for me. I'd been thinking of overapplication as a uniform practice -- a field‑scale habit. What you're describing is a resolution mismatch: we've been fertilizing at the acre scale when the biology operates at the square‑foot scale. That's a fundamentally different problem than "farmers are careless"; it's an instrumentation and incentive problem. Do we have evidence yet that variable‑rate adoption is large enough to register in Gulf hypoxia trends, or is it still too marginal to show up in NOAA's surveys?

The blue baby syndrome detail is the gut‑punch of the whole post -- that the eutrophication story has a second, more immediate human casualty list running parallel to the ecological one. Most public discourse (mine included) jumps straight to dead zones and dead crabs without registering that nitrate‑contaminated wells were killing infants in farmworker housing in real time. That's the kind of thing that should reframe "overapplication was cheap insurance" -- cheap for whom, exactly?

The dissolved organic nitrogen thread is the one I want to understand better, not argue with. If I'm following you: the conventional bookkeeping on nitrogen transport -- focused on nitrate and ammonium -- was missing a major vehicle entirely, and your 1995 Nature paper identified that for soil/groundwater systems before Moore et al. extended the finding to submarine groundwater discharge. Does that mean historical N‑loading estimates for systems like the Gulf are likely undercounts, or does DON behave differently enough (slower release, lower immediate bioavailability) that it changes the transport math without changing the eutrophication math?

And the Mokelumne discovery is just a great story -- bedrock nitrogen causing fish kills that look superficially like agricultural runoff until someone actually traces the source. I assume that's the kind of result that gets argued with by people who've already decided what the answer has to be.

Anyway, this is plenty to chew on -- genuinely curious where you land on the variable-rate and DON questions. I'll leave IBdaMann to his own devices. Take care, Patricio.

Patricio wrote:
One might say it's rather brutal and ironic that it happens in the Gulf of Mexico (sorry Trump, it's not the Gulf of America), every summer.

Patricio wrote:
The phosphorus and nitrogen that grows American corn washes down the Mississippi River and suffocates everything at the bottom of the gulf. It's gradual, not sudden, without fanfare or drama, the sea is simply depleted of it's oxygen. If you're a fish, you either get the hell out of the neighborhood or you die.

Patricio wrote:
This is called eutrophication--a 90 cent word where no 10 cent word will do, from the Greek meaning 'well-nourished." In a word, you overfeed the ocean, you starve it. Did I mention irony?

Patricio wrote:
The chain begins on land. Modern industrial agriculture applies fertilizer at scales the soil cannot fully absorb. Rain carries the surplus--nitrogen in its nitrate form, phosphorus bound to soil particles--across fields, into drainage ditches, into rivers. The Mississippi basin alone drains 41 percent of the contiguous United States. Every tributary is a delivery mechanism, and what it delivers, ultimately, is a nutrient pulse to coastal waters that have no evolutionary preparation for it.

Patricio wrote:
The bloom is the first act. When that pulse of nitrogen and phosphorus reaches sunlit shallow water, phytoplankton respond the only way they know how: they multiply. A bloom can double its biomass in a day. The surface turns green, then brown, then a color that has no pleasant name. Sunlight that once penetrated to underwater grasses now stops at the surface. The grasses die. The habitat they provided disappears.

Patricio wrote:
The bloom's death is the second act--and the lethal one. Algae do not live long. When the bloom crashes, billions of cells sink toward the seafloor, carrying with them the full caloric weight of their brief lives. Bacteria feast on the organic matter. Bacteria, like all aerobic organisms, consume oxygen as they work. In the water column above the seafloor, that oxygen is not easily replaced--stratification, driven by the warmer, fresher surface water sitting atop denser saltwater, prevents mixing. The oxygen simply gets eaten and is not replenished.

Patricio wrote:
The result is hypoxia: dissolved oxygen levels below 2 milligrams per liter, the threshold below which most marine life cannot function. Shrimp and fish flee if they can detect the boundary in time. Crabs, worms, and bottom-dwelling organisms that cannot flee die in place. The seafloor becomes a killing floor--not from poison, not from heat, but from the simple arithmetic of oxygen consumed faster than it can be restored.

Patricio wrote:
The Gulf of Mexico dead zone has become an annual fixture. It forms each spring as snowmelt and spring rains drain the Corn Belt southward, peaks in summer when stratification is strongest, and partially recovers in the fall when storms mix the water column. At its largest, measured in 2017, it covered roughly 8,800 square miles--larger than New Jersey. It is not unique: the Chesapeake Bay, the Baltic Sea, the Black Sea, and more than 400 other coastal systems worldwide show similar patterns. The number has roughly doubled every decade since the 1960s.

Patricio wrote:
The mechanism is not complicated, which makes the persistence of the problem damning. We know what causes dead zones. We know where the nitrogen comes from. We know which rivers carry it and roughly how much. The scientific literature on eutrophication is decades old, the biochemistry settled. What is not settled is the political economy of changing how 330 million acres of American farmland are fertilized, drained, and managed.
What 'dead zone'??
Nitrogen is a gas in the atmosphere. It doesn't 'come from' anywhere.
Science is not literature.
There is no such thing as 'biochemistry'.
Eutrophicaion is just another buzzword.
You don't get to manage land that isn't yours.
[quote]Patricio wrote:
Nitrogen is cheap. The consequences of its overuse are externalized--borne by shrimpers in Louisiana, by the coral that cannot reestablish itself in low-oxygen water, by the ecosystems that took millennia to develop and can be functionally destroyed in a season. The fertilizer bag on the field and the dead fish on the seafloor are connected by a logic so clear it can be drawn in a diagram. Closing the distance between those two facts--the application and the consequence--is the work that remains.

sealover wrote:
Nitrogen fertilizer used to be so cheap, it was foolish not to overapply.

sealover wrote:
Absolute maximum yield can be all that prevents bankruptcy, and overapplication of nitrogen fertilizer was cheap insurance.

sealover wrote:
My favorite eutrophication story stars myself as the guy who figured out that we needed to collect rock samples from the Mother Lode and measure their nitrogen content. I can pull up the "Rush Limbaugh..." thread for it.

sealover wrote:
Going back to a simpler time, the 1970s, eutrophication was a simpler problem. People wanted their white laundry to be "whiter than white", and phosphates added to detergent could give them that. The clothes weren't any cleaner, but the way phosphorus catches ultraviolet and glows white really did make the laundry appear "whiter than white". And phosphorus is the next most limiting nutrient after nitrogen in most ecosystems. Phosphorus is MORE limiting than nitrogen in some ecosystems. Phosphates in the detergents made good fertilizer for algae blooms.

sealover wrote:
When that first "Earth Day" happened in the spring of 1970, almost nobody realized we needed to be concerned about acidic deposition ("acid rain"), ozone layer thinning, or extreme weather. Global warming from greenhouse effect was a theoretical concern, but not expected to become a problem for decades.
Rain is naturally acidic.
It is not possible to destroy the ozone layer.
Extreme weather is completely normal.
No gas or vapor has the capability to warm the Earth.
You are ignoring the 1st law of thermodynamics again.

[quote]sealover wrote:
What the hippies DID know in 1970 was that we needed to take the phosphates out of the detergent, the lead out of the gasoline, and the DDT out of the raptor's food chain. Eutrophication from excessive use of nitrogen fertilizer wasn't recognized as a problem because it hadn't yet become one.

sealover wrote:
The "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico didn't start showing up until 1972. That year was the first time it was observed and recorded, two years too late to have been on the list of "Earth Day" concerns in 1970. There is no doubt whatsoever as to exactly what causes it.

sealover wrote:
It is tempting to blame the farmer. However, many farmers actually had conditions attached to their loans that required maximum yield measures, including deliberate over application of nitrogen fertilizer. But it was cheap enough to represent a very good investment. There were concrete benefits and no penalties for adverse impacts.

sealover wrote:
One way it came back to haunt us was by getting into the drinking water supply in farmland groundwater. "Blue baby syndrome" and I'll probably have to either look it up or just spell it wrong. Methenoglobinemia actually killed some babies in my home town, out at the migrant farm worker barracks where they drew water from a shallow well. They started testing all the water for nitrates. They even set standards for maximum allowable nitrates in drinking water, which they had to keep increasing to avoid having to shut down more wells. They even threatened to penalize farmers for contaminating wells with nitrates.
You were never a farmer.
Nitrate is not a chemical.
[quote]sealover wrote:
Another way it came back to haunt us was through nitrous oxide emissions as excess nitrogen fertilizer often got DENITRIFIED to dinitrogen gas, N2, along with by product nitrous oxide.

sealover wrote:
IBdaMann introduced himself to me at this website by posting the abstract of an EXCELLENT review paper about submarine groundwater discharge (SGD). He thought he was "debunking" my claims that carbonate ions in SGD were the major source of alkalinity entering the sea to counter all the "carbonic acid gas" (that's what chemists called CO2 two hundred years ago) entering the sea from the atmosphere.
Submarines don't discharge groundwater.
Carbonate is not a chemical.
There is no such thing as 'carbonic acid gas'.
Carbon dioxide is not an acid.

[quote]sealover wrote:
That review paper by Moore et al reviewed SGD data from many studies. Unfortunately, alkalinity was one parameter they did NOT include. But it showed something fascinating to me, personally. They found almost no nitrate in SGD. Nitrogen was either in the form of ammonium or dissolved organic nitrogen. The authors noted that dissolved organic nitrogen was an important vehicle of nitrogen transport not accounted for in most investigations. IBdaMann thought this meant they were invoking "dead zones" and the whole paper was a LIE with a political agenda.. I should pull it up. His political analysis of the paper is funny. But they followed up on my OWN discovery that dissolved organic nitrogen NEEDED to be included in investigations (Nature, 1995, volume 377, pages 227-229). Whereas I showed it to be the most important vehicle of nitrogen movement in soil and groundwater of our forest study site, Moore compiled data from others showing it was an important vehicle of nitrogen transport in submarine groundwater discharge to marine ecosystems.

sealover wrote:
But no coastal wetland is putting out enough dissolved organic nitrogen in submarine groundwater discharge to cause a "dead zone" in any sea.

sealover wrote:
On the other hand, the massive fish kills in the reservoirs of the Mokolumne River, occurring precisely at the base of the Mother Lode of California Gold Rush fame, were not from agricultural nitrogen causing eutrophication. I'm proud as hell to be the one who discovered that it was nitrogen from the bedrock. (Nature, 1998, volume 395, pages 785-788).
Agriculture is not nitrogen.
Nitrogen is not a rock.

[quote]sealover wrote:
I also got to help solve the problem, or at least try. Some aerospace engineers contracted me to help develop a soil sensor for variable rate application of nitrogen fertilizer, among other soil amendments. Near infrared reflectance spectroscopy made it possible to instantaneously determine how much bioavailable nitrogen was in the soil, so only the minimum amount required could be added according to the needs of every microsite. "Farming by the foot". Only a small minority of any field actually needed the highest rate to get maximum yield. The rest of the field was routinely over fertilized.

sealover wrote:
Patricio, you will get nothing but useless heckling from IBdaMann or Into the Night about this subject.

On the other hand, I am actually a recognized expert in this field of science, whose original discoveries about it got published in the journal NATURE.

I'm not trying to rain on your parade, Patricio

sealover wrote:
A LOT of progress has been made in variable rate agriculture, to ensure that only the parts of the field that truly NEED high N application are getting it.

sealover wrote:
Oh, and that excellent review paper by Moore et al that IBdaMann found to "debunk" my claims about alkalinity in submarine groundwater discharge ALSO notes that organic phosphorus is an important vehicle of nutrient transport. All those studies that only measured inorganic forms of N and P were missing a big part of the nutrient fluxes.

Into the Night wrote:

sealover wrote:
Nitrogen fertilizer used to be so cheap, it was foolish not to overapply.

Nitrogen is not a fertilizer.

sealover wrote:
Absolute maximum yield can be all that prevents bankruptcy, and overapplication of nitrogen fertilizer was cheap insurance.

Nitrogen is not a fertilizer.

sealover wrote:
My favorite eutrophication story stars myself as the guy who figured out that we needed to collect rock samples from the Mother Lode and measure their nitrogen content. I can pull up the "Rush Limbaugh..." thread for it.

Nitrogen is not a rock.
You don't get to speak for the dead.
There is no such thing as eutrophication.

sealover wrote:
Going back to a simpler time, the 1970s, eutrophication was a simpler problem. People wanted their white laundry to be "whiter than white", and phosphates added to detergent could give them that. The clothes weren't any cleaner, but the way phosphorus catches ultraviolet and glows white really did make the laundry appear "whiter than white". And phosphorus is the next most limiting nutrient after nitrogen in most ecosystems. Phosphorus is MORE limiting than nitrogen in some ecosystems. Phosphates in the detergents made good fertilizer for algae blooms.

There is no such thing as 'eutrophication'.
Phosphate is not a chemical.
White phosphorous is extremely dangerous.
There is no such thing as 'ecosystem'.

sealover wrote:
When that first "Earth Day" happened in the spring of 1970, almost nobody realized we needed to be concerned about acidic deposition ("acid rain"), ozone layer thinning, or extreme weather. Global warming from greenhouse effect was a theoretical concern, but not expected to become a problem for decades.
Rain is naturally acidic.
It is not possible to destroy the ozone layer.
Extreme weather is completely normal.
No gas or vapor has the capability to warm the Earth.
You are ignoring the 1st law of thermodynamics again.

[quote]sealover wrote:
What the hippies DID know in 1970 was that we needed to take the phosphates out of the detergent, the lead out of the gasoline, and the DDT out of the raptor's food chain. Eutrophication from excessive use of nitrogen fertilizer wasn't recognized as a problem because it hadn't yet become one.

Phosphate is not a chemical.
Lead was never put in gasoline. It would serve no purpose.
DDT is not part of any food chain.

sealover wrote:
The "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico didn't start showing up until 1972. That year was the first time it was observed and recorded, two years too late to have been on the list of "Earth Day" concerns in 1970. There is no doubt whatsoever as to exactly what causes it.

There is no such 'dead zone'. There is no cause for what does not exist.

sealover wrote:
It is tempting to blame the farmer. However, many farmers actually had conditions attached to their loans that required maximum yield measures, including deliberate over application of nitrogen fertilizer. But it was cheap enough to represent a very good investment. There were concrete benefits and no penalties for adverse impacts.

Nitrogen is not a fertilizer.
There is no point for a farmer to waste fertilizer.

sealover wrote:
One way it came back to haunt us was by getting into the drinking water supply in farmland groundwater. "Blue baby syndrome" and I'll probably have to either look it up or just spell it wrong. Methenoglobinemia actually killed some babies in my home town, out at the migrant farm worker barracks where they drew water from a shallow well. They started testing all the water for nitrates. They even set standards for maximum allowable nitrates in drinking water, which they had to keep increasing to avoid having to shut down more wells. They even threatened to penalize farmers for contaminating wells with nitrates.
You were never a farmer.
Nitrate is not a chemical.
[quote]sealover wrote:
Another way it came back to haunt us was through nitrous oxide emissions as excess nitrogen fertilizer often got DENITRIFIED to dinitrogen gas, N2, along with by product nitrous oxide.

Nitrogen is not nitrous oxide.
Denitrified to nitrogen is a senseless statement.

sealover wrote:
IBdaMann introduced himself to me at this website by posting the abstract of an EXCELLENT review paper about submarine groundwater discharge (SGD). He thought he was "debunking" my claims that carbonate ions in SGD were the major source of alkalinity entering the sea to counter all the "carbonic acid gas" (that's what chemists called CO2 two hundred years ago) entering the sea from the atmosphere.
Submarines don't discharge groundwater.
Carbonate is not a chemical.
There is no such thing as 'carbonic acid gas'.
Carbon dioxide is not an acid.

[quote]sealover wrote:
That review paper by Moore et al reviewed SGD data from many studies. Unfortunately, alkalinity was one parameter they did NOT include. But it showed something fascinating to me, personally. They found almost no nitrate in SGD. Nitrogen was either in the form of ammonium or dissolved organic nitrogen. The authors noted that dissolved organic nitrogen was an important vehicle of nitrogen transport not accounted for in most investigations. IBdaMann thought this meant they were invoking "dead zones" and the whole paper was a LIE with a political agenda.. I should pull it up. His political analysis of the paper is funny. But they followed up on my OWN discovery that dissolved organic nitrogen NEEDED to be included in investigations (Nature, 1995, volume 377, pages 227-229). Whereas I showed it to be the most important vehicle of nitrogen movement in soil and groundwater of our forest study site, Moore compiled data from others showing it was an important vehicle of nitrogen transport in submarine groundwater discharge to marine ecosystems.

Alkalinity is not a chemical.
Nitrate is not a chemical.
Ammonium is not a chemical.
Nitrogen is not organic.
Nitrogen is not a transport.
Submarines don't discharge groundwater.
There is no such thing as 'marine ecosystem'.

sealover wrote:
But no coastal wetland is putting out enough dissolved organic nitrogen in submarine groundwater discharge to cause a "dead zone" in any sea.

No 'dead zone'.
Nitrogen is not organic.
Submarines don't discharge groundwater.

sealover wrote:
On the other hand, the massive fish kills in the reservoirs of the Mokolumne River, occurring precisely at the base of the Mother Lode of California Gold Rush fame, were not from agricultural nitrogen causing eutrophication. I'm proud as hell to be the one who discovered that it was nitrogen from the bedrock. (Nature, 1998, volume 395, pages 785-788).
Agriculture is not nitrogen.
Nitrogen is not a rock.

[quote]sealover wrote:
I also got to help solve the problem, or at least try. Some aerospace engineers contracted me to help develop a soil sensor for variable rate application of nitrogen fertilizer, among other soil amendments. Near infrared reflectance spectroscopy made it possible to instantaneously determine how much bioavailable nitrogen was in the soil, so only the minimum amount required could be added according to the needs of every microsite. "Farming by the foot". Only a small minority of any field actually needed the highest rate to get maximum yield. The rest of the field was routinely over fertilized.

No 'problem' stated.
Soil is not aerospace.
Nitrogen is not a fertilizer.
'Bioavailable' is not a word.

sealover wrote:
Patricio, you will get nothing but useless heckling from IBdaMann or Into the Night about this subject.

On the other hand, I am actually a recognized expert in this field of science, whose original discoveries about it got published in the journal NATURE.

I'm not trying to rain on your parade, Patricio

Talking to yourself is pointless, Robert.
You deny science.
Science is not a magazine or journal.
Cliche fallacy.

sealover wrote:
A LOT of progress has been made in variable rate agriculture, to ensure that only the parts of the field that truly NEED high N application are getting it.

Nitrogen is not a fertilzer.

sealover wrote:
Oh, and that excellent review paper by Moore et al that IBdaMann found to "debunk" my claims about alkalinity in submarine groundwater discharge ALSO notes that organic phosphorus is an important vehicle of nutrient transport. All those studies that only measured inorganic forms of N and P were missing a big part of the nutrient fluxes.

Science is not a paper.
Alkalinity is not q chemical.
Submarines don't discharge groundwater.
Phosphorus is not organic.
Nitrogen is not inorganic.
Phosphorus is not inorganic.
Nutrient is not a flux.

Patricio wrote:

sealover wrote:

Patricio wrote:
One might say it's rather brutal and ironic that it happens in the Gulf of Mexico (sorry Trump, it's not the Gulf of America), every summer. The phosphorus and nitrogen that grows American corn washes down the Mississippi River and suffocates everything at the bottom of the gulf. It's gradual, not sudden, without fanfare or drama, the sea is simply depleted of it's oxygen. If you're a fish, you either get the hell out of the neighborhood or you die.

This is called eutrophication--a 90 cent word where no 10 cent word will do, from the Greek meaning 'well-nourished." In a word, you overfeed the ocean, you starve it. Did I mention irony?

The chain begins on land. Modern industrial agriculture applies fertilizer at scales the soil cannot fully absorb. Rain carries the surplus--nitrogen in its nitrate form, phosphorus bound to soil particles--across fields, into drainage ditches, into rivers. The Mississippi basin alone drains 41 percent of the contiguous United States. Every tributary is a delivery mechanism, and what it delivers, ultimately, is a nutrient pulse to coastal waters that have no evolutionary preparation for it.

The bloom is the first act. When that pulse of nitrogen and phosphorus reaches sunlit shallow water, phytoplankton respond the only way they know how: they multiply. A bloom can double its biomass in a day. The surface turns green, then brown, then a color that has no pleasant name. Sunlight that once penetrated to underwater grasses now stops at the surface. The grasses die. The habitat they provided disappears.

The bloom's death is the second act--and the lethal one. Algae do not live long. When the bloom crashes, billions of cells sink toward the seafloor, carrying with them the full caloric weight of their brief lives. Bacteria feast on the organic matter. Bacteria, like all aerobic organisms, consume oxygen as they work. In the water column above the seafloor, that oxygen is not easily replaced--stratification, driven by the warmer, fresher surface water sitting atop denser saltwater, prevents mixing. The oxygen simply gets eaten and is not replenished.

The result is hypoxia: dissolved oxygen levels below 2 milligrams per liter, the threshold below which most marine life cannot function. Shrimp and fish flee if they can detect the boundary in time. Crabs, worms, and bottom-dwelling organisms that cannot flee die in place. The seafloor becomes a killing floor--not from poison, not from heat, but from the simple arithmetic of oxygen consumed faster than it can be restored.

The Gulf of Mexico dead zone has become an annual fixture. It forms each spring as snowmelt and spring rains drain the Corn Belt southward, peaks in summer when stratification is strongest, and partially recovers in the fall when storms mix the water column. At its largest, measured in 2017, it covered roughly 8,800 square miles--larger than New Jersey. It is not unique: the Chesapeake Bay, the Baltic Sea, the Black Sea, and more than 400 other coastal systems worldwide show similar patterns. The number has roughly doubled every decade since the 1960s.

The mechanism is not complicated, which makes the persistence of the problem damning. We know what causes dead zones. We know where the nitrogen comes from. We know which rivers carry it and roughly how much. The scientific literature on eutrophication is decades old, the biochemistry settled. What is not settled is the political economy of changing how 330 million acres of American farmland are fertilized, drained, and managed.

Nitrogen is cheap. The consequences of its overuse are externalized--borne by shrimpers in Louisiana, by the coral that cannot reestablish itself in low-oxygen water, by the ecosystems that took millennia to develop and can be functionally destroyed in a season. The fertilizer bag on the field and the dead fish on the seafloor are connected by a logic so clear it can be drawn in a diagram. Closing the distance between those two facts--the application and the consequence--is the work that remains.

References:
Rabalais, N. N., Turner, R. E., & Wiseman, W. J. (2001). Hypoxia in the Gulf of Mexico. Journal of Environmental Quality, 30(2), 320–329. https://doi.org/10.2134/jeq2001.302320x

Diaz, R. J., & Rosenberg, R. (2008). Spreading dead zones and consequences for marine ecosystems. Science, 321(5891), 926–929. https://sciences.ucf.edu/biology/d4lab/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2024/08/Diaz-Rosenberg-2008.pdf

NOAA. (2017). Gulf of Mexico 'dead zone' is the largest ever measured. https://www.noaa.gov/media-release/gulf-of-mexico-dead-zone-is-largest-ever-measured

Nitrogen fertilizer used to be so cheap, it was foolish not to overapply.

Absolute maximum yield can be all that prevents bankruptcy, and overapplication of nitrogen fertilizer was cheap insurance.

My favorite eutrophication story stars myself as the guy who figured out that we needed to collect rock samples from the Mother Lode and measure their nitrogen content. I can pull up the "Rush Limbaugh..." thread for it.

Going back to a simpler time, the 1970s, eutrophication was a simpler problem. People wanted their white laundry to be "whiter than white", and phosphates added to detergent could give them that. The clothes weren't any cleaner, but the way phosphorus catches ultraviolet and glows white really did make the laundry appear "whiter than white". And phosphorus is the next most limiting nutrient after nitrogen in most ecosystems. Phosphorus is MORE limiting than nitrogen in some ecosystems. Phosphates in the detergents made good fertilizer for algae blooms.

When that first "Earth Day" happened in the spring of 1970, almost nobody realized we needed to be concerned about acidic deposition ("acid rain"), ozone layer thinning, or extreme weather. Global warming from greenhouse effect was a theoretical concern, but not expected to become a problem for decades.

What the hippies DID know in 1970 was that we needed to take the phosphates out of the detergent, the lead out of the gasoline, and the DDT out of the raptor's food chain. Eutrophication from excessive use of nitrogen fertilizer wasn't recognized as a problem because it hadn't yet become one.

The "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico didn't start showing up until 1972. That year was the first time it was observed and recorded, two years too late to have been on the list of "Earth Day" concerns in 1970. There is no doubt whatsoever as to exactly what causes it.

It is tempting to blame the farmer. However, many farmers actually had conditions attached to their loans that required maximum yield measures, including deliberate over application of nitrogen fertilizer. But it was cheap enough to represent a very good investment. There were concrete benefits and no penalties for adverse impacts.

One way it came back to haunt us was by getting into the drinking water supply in farmland groundwater. "Blue baby syndrome" and I'll probably have to either look it up or just spell it wrong. Methenoglobinemia actually killed some babies in my home town, out at the migrant farm worker barracks where they drew water from a shallow well. They started testing all the water for nitrates. They even set standards for maximum allowable nitrates in drinking water, which they had to keep increasing to avoid having to shut down more wells. They even threatened to penalize farmers for contaminating wells with nitrates.

Another way it came back to haunt us was through nitrous oxide emissions as excess nitrogen fertilizer often got DENITRIFIED to dinitrogen gas, N2, along with by product nitrous oxide.

IBdaMann introduced himself to me at this website by posting the abstract of an EXCELLENT review paper about submarine groundwater discharge (SGD). He thought he was "debunking" my claims that carbonate ions in SGD were the major source of alkalinity entering the sea to counter all the "carbonic acid gas" (that's what chemists called CO2 two hundred years ago) entering the sea from the atmosphere.

That review paper by Moore et al reviewed SGD data from many studies. Unfortunately, alkalinity was one parameter they did NOT include. But it showed something fascinating to me, personally. They found almost no nitrate in SGD. Nitrogen was either in the form of ammonium or dissolved organic nitrogen. The authors noted that dissolved organic nitrogen was an important vehicle of nitrogen transport not accounted for in most investigations. IBdaMann thought this meant they were invoking "dead zones" and the whole paper was a LIE with a political agenda.. I should pull it up. His political analysis of the paper is funny. But they followed up on my OWN discovery that dissolved organic nitrogen NEEDED to be included in investigations (Nature, 1995, volume 377, pages 227-229). Whereas I showed it to be the most important vehicle of nitrogen movement in soil and groundwater of our forest study site, Moore compiled data from others showing it was an important vehicle of nitrogen transport in submarine groundwater discharge to marine ecosystems.

But no coastal wetland is putting out enough dissolved organic nitrogen in submarine groundwater discharge to cause a "dead zone" in any sea.

On the other hand, the massive fish kills in the reservoirs of the Mokolumne River, occurring precisely at the base of the Mother Lode of California Gold Rush fame, were not from agricultural nitrogen causing eutrophication. I'm proud as hell to be the one who discovered that it was nitrogen from the bedrock. (Nature, 1998, volume 395, pages 785-788).

I also got to help solve the problem, or at least try. Some aerospace engineers contracted me to help develop a soil sensor for variable rate application of nitrogen fertilizer, among other soil amendments. Near infrared reflectance spectroscopy made it possible to instantaneously determine how much bioavailable nitrogen was in the soil, so only the minimum amount required could be added according to the needs of every microsite. "Farming by the foot". Only a small minority of any field actually needed the highest rate to get maximum yield. The rest of the field was routinely over fertilized.

Patricio, you will get nothing but useless heckling from IBdaMann or Into the Night about this subject.

On the other hand, I am actually a recognized expert in this field of science, whose original discoveries about it got published in the journal NATURE.

I'm not trying to rain on your parade, Patricio

A LOT of progress has been made in variable rate agriculture, to ensure that only the parts of the field that truly NEED high N application are getting it.

Oh, and that excellent review paper by Moore et al that IBdaMann found to "debunk" my claims about alkalinity in submarine groundwater discharge ALSO notes that organic phosphorus is an important vehicle of nutrient transport. All those studies that only measured inorganic forms of N and P were missing a big part of the nutrient fluxes.

Patricio replies

Well, Sealover, once upon a time (and I still have long hair) I was a 'hippie', though I was always more into jazz than rock and only took LSD three times

. Anyway, love the history/memory lane, acid rain, etc., and genuine respect for what you've actually accomplished in this field.

The "farming by the foot" detail reframes the whole issue for me. I'd been thinking of overapplication as a uniform practice -- a field‑scale habit. What you're describing is a resolution mismatch: we've been fertilizing at the acre scale when the biology operates at the square‑foot scale. That's a fundamentally different problem than "farmers are careless"; it's an instrumentation and incentive problem. Do we have evidence yet that variable‑rate adoption is large enough to register in Gulf hypoxia trends, or is it still too marginal to show up in NOAA's surveys?

The blue baby syndrome detail is the gut‑punch of the whole post -- that the eutrophication story has a second, more immediate human casualty list running parallel to the ecological one. Most public discourse (mine included) jumps straight to dead zones and dead crabs without registering that nitrate‑contaminated wells were killing infants in farmworker housing in real time. That's the kind of thing that should reframe "overapplication was cheap insurance" -- cheap for whom, exactly?

The dissolved organic nitrogen thread is the one I want to understand better, not argue with. If I'm following you: the conventional bookkeeping on nitrogen transport -- focused on nitrate and ammonium -- was missing a major vehicle entirely, and your 1995 Nature paper identified that for soil/groundwater systems before Moore et al. extended the finding to submarine groundwater discharge. Does that mean historical N‑loading estimates for systems like the Gulf are likely undercounts, or does DON behave differently enough (slower release, lower immediate bioavailability) that it changes the transport math without changing the eutrophication math?

And the Mokelumne discovery is just a great story -- bedrock nitrogen causing fish kills that look superficially like agricultural runoff until someone actually traces the source. I assume that's the kind of result that gets argued with by people who've already decided what the answer has to be.

Anyway, this is plenty to chew on -- genuinely curious where you land on the variable-rate and DON questions. I'll leave IBdaMann to his own devices. Take care, Patricio.

sealover wrote:
Revision of Numbers in Old Data Sets - the Missing Organic Nitrogen.

Patricio, of your questions deserves front and center, top position.

Yes, the DID underestimate the total nitrogen fluxes from watersheds into streams and from rivers into the sea, for many decades. Some studies really DID measure total nitrogen, using Kjeldahl digestion to dissolve and transform all forms of nitrogen in the sample for measure of total nitrogen content. Most just measured ammonium and nitrate, knowing that dissolved organic forms of N existed, but presuming them to be present only at negligible concentration.

Within a year of my paper in Nature identifying the importance of dissolved organic nitrogen, literally hundreds of papers had been submitted for review that confirmed the importance of DON across the board, from rain water to soil water, surface water, ground water, sea water. Everyone was confirming that DON was hardly negligible, and even accounted for the lion's share of N in some waters. A lot of samples had been measured for nitrogen without catching an important species.

So, 1996, the Chapman Conference on Nitrogen in Watersheds.. Can't remember the exact title, but it was in Sunriver, Oregon. Well, organic nitrogen was a BIG deal that EVERYONE could get an original paper out of. Any place they finally measured it for the first time and confirmed its presence was another original finding of where previous data sets were proved to be inaccurate. The total fluxes of nitrogen from land to sea were considerably larger than measurement of inorganic nitrogen alone had made us believe.

So, what do you do with the old data sets? Obviously, you're going to measure DON from now on so you'll never miss it, but how do you know how much you missed before. Even in 1996, a "camp" within that conference had agreed upon a way for quick back of the envelope calculations to get ballpark estimates of how much nitrogen they missed. A ten to one ratio for dissolved organic carbon to dissolved organic nitrogen could be used to take old numbers for DOC and turn them into numbers for DON. It was pretty consistent across a lot of ecosystems, that ten to one ratio of DOC

ON. In 1996, they agreed that this was just a first step to make some educated guesses.

I honestly don't know if anyone officially revised any old data sets to include new and larger numbers for nitrogen fluxes. There are ethical considerations around literally making up data to add to an old data set. It isn't hard to prove that you most certainly missed a lot of nitrogen. It is impossible to prove exactly how much you missed. But knowing you missed it is important. Certainly some kind of asterisk to older data tables, in any case.

--------------------------------------------------------




Patricio replies

Well, Sealover, once upon a time (and I still have long hair) I was a 'hippie', though I was always more into jazz than rock and only took LSD three times

. Anyway, love the history/memory lane, acid rain, etc., and genuine respect for what you've actually accomplished in this field.

The "farming by the foot" detail reframes the whole issue for me. I'd been thinking of overapplication as a uniform practice -- a field‑scale habit. What you're describing is a resolution mismatch: we've been fertilizing at the acre scale when the biology operates at the square‑foot scale. That's a fundamentally different problem than "farmers are careless"; it's an instrumentation and incentive problem. Do we have evidence yet that variable‑rate adoption is large enough to register in Gulf hypoxia trends, or is it still too marginal to show up in NOAA's surveys?

The blue baby syndrome detail is the gut‑punch of the whole post -- that the eutrophication story has a second, more immediate human casualty list running parallel to the ecological one. Most public discourse (mine included) jumps straight to dead zones and dead crabs without registering that nitrate‑contaminated wells were killing infants in farmworker housing in real time. That's the kind of thing that should reframe "overapplication was cheap insurance" -- cheap for whom, exactly?

The dissolved organic nitrogen thread is the one I want to understand better, not argue with. If I'm following you: the conventional bookkeeping on nitrogen transport -- focused on nitrate and ammonium -- was missing a major vehicle entirely, and your 1995 Nature paper identified that for soil/groundwater systems before Moore et al. extended the finding to submarine groundwater discharge. Does that mean historical N‑loading estimates for systems like the Gulf are likely undercounts, or does DON behave differently enough (slower release, lower immediate bioavailability) that it changes the transport math without changing the eutrophication math?

And the Mokelumne discovery is just a great story -- bedrock nitrogen causing fish kills that look superficially like agricultural runoff until someone actually traces the source. I assume that's the kind of result that gets argued with by people who've already decided what the answer has to be.

Anyway, this is plenty to chew on -- genuinely curious where you land on the variable-rate and DON questions. I'll leave IBdaMann to his own devices. Take care, Patricio.

Im a BM wrote:
It seems that you are trying to tell us that something is NOT something else that it is not.

When the other trolls used to hang out with you, did any of them pretend to believe that you actually understood any chemistry?

If they were still here, I would ask them.

I even extended multiple invitations to them.

They had a chance to back you up when I asked if ANYONE believes that this punk ass FRAUD scientifically illiterate moron is really a "chemist".

It has become abundantly clear that Into the Night is a "chemist" who LITERALLY doesn't even know what a "chemical" is.

Sure as hell can't DEFINE HIS TERMS for it, but CONSTANTLY makes his ENTIRE ARGUMENT a list of words that he does not believe are a "chemical".

Chemistry FAKER does not know what a chemical IS.

But that won't stop him from trolling EVERY POST about chemistry.

Because something is not something else that it is not.

Science is not something that is not science.

The name of an ion does not identify a chemical?

WTF??

Does ANYONE fall for your bullshit, fake "scientist" act?

I sure don't.

From what ITN posts, he doesn't even know what science IS.

sealover wrote: and Patricio wrote:
Revision of Numbers in Old Data Sets - the Missing Organic Nitrogen.

sealover wrote: and Patricio wrote:
Patricio, of your questions deserves front and center, top position.

sealover wrote: and Patricio wrote:
Yes, the DID underestimate the total nitrogen fluxes from watersheds into streams and from rivers into the sea, for many decades. Some studies really DID measure total nitrogen, using Kjeldahl digestion to dissolve and transform all forms of nitrogen in the sample for measure of total nitrogen content. Most just measured ammonium and nitrate, knowing that dissolved organic forms of N existed, but presuming them to be present only at negligible concentration.

sealover wrote: and Patricio wrote:
Within a year of my paper in Nature identifying the importance of dissolved organic nitrogen, literally hundreds of papers had been submitted for review that confirmed the importance of DON across the board, from rain water to soil water, surface water, ground water, sea water. Everyone was confirming that DON was hardly negligible, and even accounted for the lion's share of N in some waters. A lot of samples had been measured for nitrogen without catching an important species.

sealover wrote: and Patricio wrote:
So, 1996, the Chapman Conference on Nitrogen in Watersheds.. Can't remember the exact title, but it was in Sunriver, Oregon. Well, organic nitrogen was a BIG deal that EVERYONE could get an original paper out of. Any place they finally measured it for the first time and confirmed its presence was another original finding of where previous data sets were proved to be inaccurate. The total fluxes of nitrogen from land to sea were considerably larger than measurement of inorganic nitrogen alone had made us believe.

sealover wrote: and Patricio wrote:
So, what do you do with the old data sets? Obviously, you're going to measure DON from now on so you'll never miss it, but how do you know how much you missed before. Even in 1996, a "camp" within that conference had agreed upon a way for quick back of the envelope calculations to get ballpark estimates of how much nitrogen they missed. A ten to one ratio for dissolved organic carbon to dissolved organic nitrogen could be used to take old numbers for DOC and turn them into numbers for DON. It was pretty consistent across a lot of ecosystems, that ten to one ratio of DOC

ON. In 1996, they agreed that this was just a first step to make some educated guesses.

sealover wrote: and Patricio wrote:
I honestly don't know if anyone officially revised any old data sets to include new and larger numbers for nitrogen fluxes. There are ethical considerations around literally making up data to add to an old data set. It isn't hard to prove that you most certainly missed a lot of nitrogen. It is impossible to prove exactly how much you missed. But knowing you missed it is important. Certainly some kind of asterisk to older data tables, in any case.

sealover wrote: and Patricio wrote:
Well, Sealover, once upon a time (and I still have long hair) I was a 'hippie', though I was always more into jazz than rock and only took LSD three times

. Anyway, love the history/memory lane, acid rain, etc., and genuine respect for what you've actually accomplished in this field.

sealover wrote: and Patricio wrote:
The "farming by the foot" detail reframes the whole issue for me. I'd been thinking of overapplication as a uniform practice -- a field‑scale habit. What you're describing is a resolution mismatch: we've been fertilizing at the acre scale when the biology operates at the square‑foot scale. That's a fundamentally different problem than "farmers are careless"; it's an instrumentation and incentive problem. Do we have evidence yet that variable‑rate adoption is large enough to register in Gulf hypoxia trends, or is it still too marginal to show up in NOAA's surveys?

sealover wrote: and Patricio wrote:
The blue baby syndrome detail is the gut‑punch of the whole post -- that the eutrophication story has a second, more immediate human casualty list running parallel to the ecological one. Most public discourse (mine included) jumps straight to dead zones and dead crabs without registering that nitrate‑contaminated wells were killing infants in farmworker housing in real time. That's the kind of thing that should reframe "overapplication was cheap insurance" -- cheap for whom, exactly?

sealover wrote: and Patricio wrote:
The dissolved organic nitrogen thread is the one I want to understand better, not argue with. If I'm following you: the conventional bookkeeping on nitrogen transport -- focused on nitrate and ammonium -- was missing a major vehicle entirely, and your 1995 Nature paper identified that for soil/groundwater systems before Moore et al. extended the finding to submarine groundwater discharge. Does that mean historical N‑loading estimates for systems like the Gulf are likely undercounts, or does DON behave differently enough (slower release, lower immediate bioavailability) that it changes the transport math without changing the eutrophication math?

sealover wrote: and Patricio wrote:
And the Mokelumne discovery is just a great story -- bedrock nitrogen causing fish kills that look superficially like agricultural runoff until someone actually traces the source. I assume that's the kind of result that gets argued with by people who've already decided what the answer has to be.

sealover wrote: and Patricio wrote:
Anyway, this is plenty to chew on -- genuinely curious where you land on the variable-rate and DON questions. I'll leave IBdaMann to his own devices. Take care, Patricio.

sealover wrote: and Patricio wrote:
I have to resist the temptation to delay my plan to go to the river right now...

Yes, they underestimated the amount of nitrogen entering the sea from river flows EVERYWHERE during the decades when they only measured ammonium and nitrate. In more than a few rivers, organic nitrogen was MOST of the total N flux. They have gone back to old data sets to estimate how much nitrogen they missed, based on how much organic nitrogen they have speciated since. They can even calibrate a watershed-specific organicN-organicC ratio where they have TOC data and DON data, to use TOC data from the past to fill in the blank.

sealover wrote: and Patricio wrote:
Variable rate agriculture has advanced by leaps and bounds since I worked on it, and it TOTALLY changes the equation for ensuring maximum yield without a one size fits all application rate based on the LEAST fertile microsite. But the sensor I worked on died a tragic death from a too-trusting "catch and kill" contract. Nothing runs like a SNAKE! They wanted farmers to wait a while before offering the new technology.

sealover wrote: and Patricio wrote:
And the nitrogen in the rocks story involved Rush Limbaugh because he PRAISED my discovery on his show. We were contracted by Cal Forest to investigate because logging practices were being falsely accused of causing the fish kills. Rush was delighted that we proved it was Mother Nature killing the fish. And I didn't get a chance to tell Rush that if the ranchers hadn't killed the deep rooted perrenial chapparal to clear it for pasture, that bedrock nitrogen could have been intercepted by the vegetation like it used to be, rather than getting into the river.

sealover wrote: and Patricio wrote:
-----------------------------------

Okay, I'm back from the river. An otter came very close to me, while a great blue heron stood a few meters away. It made my day!

There is considerable irony that IBdaMann accuses me of being gullible and brainwashed by the dogma they indoctrinate into science students at Commie universities.

sealover wrote: and Patricio wrote:
I was actually a major contrarian thorn in their side at the Ivory Tower.

sealover wrote: and Patricio wrote:
I insisted that they were all WRONG about what they thought they knew about some very basic stuff. They got the basic nitrogen cycle WRONG for many ecosystems, failing to realize that it was being short circuited by mycorrhizal fungi transferring nitrogen in organic form to the host plant root. They got it WRONG that dissolved organic forms of nitrogen were a negligible component of nitrogen fluxes in soils and waters. They got it WRONG that the adaptive value for natural selection of plant tannins was for anti herbivore defense, rather than for engineering plant-litter-soil interactions to their advantage to monopolize scarce resources. They got it WRONG that bedrock nitrogen was a negligible contributor to nitrate in any mountain stream waters.

sealover wrote: and Patricio wrote:
In the Ivory Tower, it was ME who was the contrarian making outrageous assertions that contradicted the mainstream consensus.

sealover wrote: and Patricio wrote:
But the rules were different there than they are at climate-debate.com

I had to come up with some kind of credible EVIDENCE before anyone was going to just take my word for it.

sealover wrote: and Patricio wrote:
They kind of insist that science IS a citation, if the only other choice offered to support one's assertions is their presumed-to-be-self-evident omniscience.

sealover wrote: and Patricio wrote:
"No, its' not!" never won any Nobel Prizes until it was able to prove... "and THIS is what it actually IS (with LOTS of evidence and detailed explanation)".

sealover wrote: and Patricio wrote:
Even then, a whole bunch of other scientists were going to have to independently verify its reproducibility before "No, it's not" was ever going to be taken seriously. A good explanation for what actually IS in that case is required.

Into the Night wrote:

sealover wrote: and Patricio wrote:
Revision of Numbers in Old Data Sets - the Missing Organic Nitrogen.

Nitrogen is not organic.
Nitrogen is not a dataset.

sealover wrote: and Patricio wrote:
Patricio, of your questions deserves front and center, top position.

Talking to yourself is pointless.

sealover wrote: and Patricio wrote:
Yes, the DID underestimate the total nitrogen fluxes from watersheds into streams and from rivers into the sea, for many decades. Some studies really DID measure total nitrogen, using Kjeldahl digestion to dissolve and transform all forms of nitrogen in the sample for measure of total nitrogen content. Most just measured ammonium and nitrate, knowing that dissolved organic forms of N existed, but presuming them to be present only at negligible concentration.

Nitrogen is not a flux.
Nitrogen is not water.
Nitrogen has only one form.
Ammonium is not a chemical.
Nitrate is not a chemical.
Nitrogen is not organic.
Apparently its news to you that gases can and do dissolve in water.

sealover wrote: and Patricio wrote:
Within a year of my paper in Nature identifying the importance of dissolved organic nitrogen, literally hundreds of papers had been submitted for review that confirmed the importance of DON across the board, from rain water to soil water, surface water, ground water, sea water. Everyone was confirming that DON was hardly negligible, and even accounted for the lion's share of N in some waters. A lot of samples had been measured for nitrogen without catching an important species.

Science is not a paper.
Science is not a magazine or journal.
Nitrogen is not organic.
Nitrogen is not water.
Void dataset.

sealover wrote: and Patricio wrote:
So, 1996, the Chapman Conference on Nitrogen in Watersheds.. Can't remember the exact title, but it was in Sunriver, Oregon. Well, organic nitrogen was a BIG deal that EVERYONE could get an original paper out of. Any place they finally measured it for the first time and confirmed its presence was another original finding of where previous data sets were proved to be inaccurate. The total fluxes of nitrogen from land to sea were considerably larger than measurement of inorganic nitrogen alone had made us believe.

Nitrogen is not water.
Nitrogen is not a flux.
Nitrogen is not organic.
Nitrogen is not inorganic.

sealover wrote: and Patricio wrote:
So, what do you do with the old data sets? Obviously, you're going to measure DON from now on so you'll never miss it, but how do you know how much you missed before. Even in 1996, a "camp" within that conference had agreed upon a way for quick back of the envelope calculations to get ballpark estimates of how much nitrogen they missed. A ten to one ratio for dissolved organic carbon to dissolved organic nitrogen could be used to take old numbers for DOC and turn them into numbers for DON. It was pretty consistent across a lot of ecosystems, that ten to one ratio of DOC

ON. In 1996, they agreed that this was just a first step to make some educated guesses.

Void dataset.
DON is not a chemical.
Nitrogen is not organic.
Carbon is not organic.
DOC is not a chemical.

sealover wrote: and Patricio wrote:
I honestly don't know if anyone officially revised any old data sets to include new and larger numbers for nitrogen fluxes. There are ethical considerations around literally making up data to add to an old data set. It isn't hard to prove that you most certainly missed a lot of nitrogen. It is impossible to prove exactly how much you missed. But knowing you missed it is important. Certainly some kind of asterisk to older data tables, in any case.

Void dataset.

sealover wrote: and Patricio wrote:
Well, Sealover, once upon a time (and I still have long hair) I was a 'hippie', though I was always more into jazz than rock and only took LSD three times

. Anyway, love the history/memory lane, acid rain, etc., and genuine respect for what you've actually accomplished in this field.

You already declared you were a drug user.
Rain is naturally acidic.
You have accomplished nothing. You are a nothing.

sealover wrote: and Patricio wrote:
The "farming by the foot" detail reframes the whole issue for me. I'd been thinking of overapplication as a uniform practice -- a field‑scale habit. What you're describing is a resolution mismatch: we've been fertilizing at the acre scale when the biology operates at the square‑foot scale. That's a fundamentally different problem than "farmers are careless"; it's an instrumentation and incentive problem. Do we have evidence yet that variable‑rate adoption is large enough to register in Gulf hypoxia trends, or is it still too marginal to show up in NOAA's surveys?

What 'Gulf hypoxia'??

sealover wrote: and Patricio wrote:
The blue baby syndrome detail is the gut‑punch of the whole post -- that the eutrophication story has a second, more immediate human casualty list running parallel to the ecological one. Most public discourse (mine included) jumps straight to dead zones and dead crabs without registering that nitrate‑contaminated wells were killing infants in farmworker housing in real time. That's the kind of thing that should reframe "overapplication was cheap insurance" -- cheap for whom, exactly?

What 'blue baby syndrome'??
There is no such thing as 'eutrophication'.
Ecology is not science. Buzzword fallacies.
Nitrate is not a chemical.

sealover wrote: and Patricio wrote:
The dissolved organic nitrogen thread is the one I want to understand better, not argue with. If I'm following you: the conventional bookkeeping on nitrogen transport -- focused on nitrate and ammonium -- was missing a major vehicle entirely, and your 1995 Nature paper identified that for soil/groundwater systems before Moore et al. extended the finding to submarine groundwater discharge. Does that mean historical N‑loading estimates for systems like the Gulf are likely undercounts, or does DON behave differently enough (slower release, lower immediate bioavailability) that it changes the transport math without changing the eutrophication math?

Nitrogen is not organic.
Nitrogen is not a transport.
Nitrate is not a chemical.
Ammonium is not a chemical.
Nitrogen is not a vehicle.
Science is not a paper.
Submarines do not discharge groundwater.
DON is not a chemical.
'Bioavailability' is not a word.
Argument from randU fallacies.

sealover wrote: and Patricio wrote:
And the Mokelumne discovery is just a great story -- bedrock nitrogen causing fish kills that look superficially like agricultural runoff until someone actually traces the source. I assume that's the kind of result that gets argued with by people who've already decided what the answer has to be.

Nitrogen is not a rock.
Nitrogen does not kill fish.

sealover wrote: and Patricio wrote:
Anyway, this is plenty to chew on -- genuinely curious where you land on the variable-rate and DON questions. I'll leave IBdaMann to his own devices. Take care, Patricio.

DON is not a chemical.
Holy Word (variable rate).Buzzword fallacy.
Cliche fallacy.

sealover wrote: and Patricio wrote:
I have to resist the temptation to delay my plan to go to the river right now...

Yes, they underestimated the amount of nitrogen entering the sea from river flows EVERYWHERE during the decades when they only measured ammonium and nitrate. In more than a few rivers, organic nitrogen was MOST of the total N flux. They have gone back to old data sets to estimate how much nitrogen they missed, based on how much organic nitrogen they have speciated since. They can even calibrate a watershed-specific organicN-organicC ratio where they have TOC data and DON data, to use TOC data from the past to fill in the blank.

Nitrogen is not water.
Ammonium is not a chemical.
Nitrate is not a chemical.
Nitrogen is not organic.
Nitrogen is not a flux.
Void dataset.
Nitrogen is not inorganic.
TOC is not a chemical.
DON is not a chemical.

sealover wrote: and Patricio wrote:
Variable rate agriculture has advanced by leaps and bounds since I worked on it, and it TOTALLY changes the equation for ensuring maximum yield without a one size fits all application rate based on the LEAST fertile microsite. But the sensor I worked on died a tragic death from a too-trusting "catch and kill" contract. Nothing runs like a SNAKE! They wanted farmers to wait a while before offering the new technology.

Holy Words (variable rate agriculture, equation, maximum yiield, fertile microsite). Buzzword fallacies.
Cliche fallacies.

sealover wrote: and Patricio wrote:
And the nitrogen in the rocks story involved Rush Limbaugh because he PRAISED my discovery on his show. We were contracted by Cal Forest to investigate because logging practices were being falsely accused of causing the fish kills. Rush was delighted that we proved it was Mother Nature killing the fish. And I didn't get a chance to tell Rush that if the ranchers hadn't killed the deep rooted perrenial chapparal to clear it for pasture, that bedrock nitrogen could have been intercepted by the vegetation like it used to be, rather than getting into the river.

Nitrogen is not a rock.
You don't get to speak for the dead.
Fish don't live in trees.
Nitrogen is not water.

sealover wrote: and Patricio wrote:
-----------------------------------

Okay, I'm back from the river. An otter came very close to me, while a great blue heron stood a few meters away. It made my day!

There is considerable irony that IBdaMann accuses me of being gullible and brainwashed by the dogma they indoctrinate into science students at Commie universities.

He is correct. They do. You are an example.

sealover wrote: and Patricio wrote:
I was actually a major contrarian thorn in their side at the Ivory Tower.

No such tower.

sealover wrote: and Patricio wrote:
I insisted that they were all WRONG about what they thought they knew about some very basic stuff. They got the basic nitrogen cycle WRONG for many ecosystems, failing to realize that it was being short circuited by mycorrhizal fungi transferring nitrogen in organic form to the host plant root. They got it WRONG that dissolved organic forms of nitrogen were a negligible component of nitrogen fluxes in soils and waters. They got it WRONG that the adaptive value for natural selection of plant tannins was for anti herbivore defense, rather than for engineering plant-litter-soil interactions to their advantage to monopolize scarce resources. They got it WRONG that bedrock nitrogen was a negligible contributor to nitrate in any mountain stream waters.

Nitrogen is not a cycle.
'Ecosystem' is not a word.
Nitrogen is not organic.
Nitrogen is not a flux.
Nitrogen is not water.
Tannin is not a chemical.
Nitrogen is not a rock.
Nitrate is not a chemical.

sealover wrote: and Patricio wrote:
In the Ivory Tower, it was ME who was the contrarian making outrageous assertions that contradicted the mainstream consensus.

No such tower.
Science does not use consensus.

sealover wrote: and Patricio wrote:
But the rules were different there than they are at climate-debate.com

I had to come up with some kind of credible EVIDENCE before anyone was going to just take my word for it.

Buzzwords and gibber-babble is not evidence of anything more than your predilection for buzzwords and gibber-babble.

sealover wrote: and Patricio wrote:
They kind of insist that science IS a citation, if the only other choice offered to support one's assertions is their presumed-to-be-self-evident omniscience.

Science is not a citation.
You deny theories of science. You can't make them just disappear.

sealover wrote: and Patricio wrote:
"No, its' not!" never won any Nobel Prizes until it was able to prove... "and THIS is what it actually IS (with LOTS of evidence and detailed explanation)".

Science is not a prize.
You deny theories of science.
You deny chemistry.
You deny mathematics.
You deny logic.
You deny philosophy.
You think buzzwords and gibber-babble is 'science'.

sealover wrote: and Patricio wrote:
Even then, a whole bunch of other scientists were going to have to independently verify its reproducibility before "No, it's not" was ever going to be taken seriously. A good explanation for what actually IS in that case is required.

Science does not use consensus.
Science does not 'verify' any theory.
You deny theories of science.
You deny chemistry.
You deny mathematics.
You deny logic.
You deny philosophy.

Im a BM wrote:
Are ALL of Into the Night's 24,181 posts as good as THIS one?

Are all 24,181 of his posts as INFORMATIVE as this one?

Do they all display such MASTERY of science as this one?

Future scientists will honor his legacy.

He taught us all SO MUCH.

Praise the genius "chemist"!

Praise the "is not a chemical" WISDOM!

It explains EVERYTHING to identify what is "not a chemical".

To make it all the more intriguing, the definition used for "chemical" is SECRET.

Real chemists don't reveal their secret definitions.

All you need to know is what is NOT a "chemical", and you know EVERYTHING.

Just don't tell anyone what you fantasize the term "chemical" to actually mean.

Into the Night wrote:

Im a BM wrote:
Are ALL of Into the Night's 24,181 posts as good as THIS one?

Are all 24,181 of his posts as INFORMATIVE as this one?

Do they all display such MASTERY of science as this one?

Future scientists will honor his legacy.

He taught us all SO MUCH.

Praise the genius "chemist"!

Praise the "is not a chemical" WISDOM!

It explains EVERYTHING to identify what is "not a chemical".

To make it all the more intriguing, the definition used for "chemical" is SECRET.

Real chemists don't reveal their secret definitions.

All you need to know is what is NOT a "chemical", and you know EVERYTHING.

Just don't tell anyone what you fantasize the term "chemical" to actually mean.

Whining. That gets you nowhere, Robert.
You apparently have learned NOTHING.

Im a BM wrote:
You can go ahead and keep your private definition for "chemical" a SECRET.

GOOGLE isn't afraid to reveal her secrets.

Google inquiry: "What is the definition of 'chemical'?"

She has no reason to keep her answer secret.

Google say: "A chemical is any substance that has a defined atomic or molecular composition. By this scientific definition, virtually anything in the universe is made of chemicals - including the air you breathe, the food you eat, and your own body."

Im a BM wrote:
Correct, according to what they taught me in college and in grad school for a masters, in grad school for a PhD, and in post doctoral research.

But MOST of those things that Into the Night insists are "not a chemical" are, in fact, CHEMICALS.

Im a BM wrote:
Perhaps Into the Night will someday share his SECRET definition for the term "chemical", and his thousands of "(name of ion) is not a chemical" statements might actually make sense somehow.

Im a BM wrote:
We might finally understand WHY Into the Night has formed the OPINION that "carbonate is not a chemical" or "CO3(2-) is not a chemical" "fluoride is not a chemical" "sulfate is not a chemical" "phosphate is not a chemical"...

Actually, it would take me a very long time to list every ION NAME that Into the Night has unilaterally declared to be "not a chemical".

Aren't you supposed to "define your terms" in "science"?

Im a BM wrote:
Into the Night doesn't DARE answer with anything more clear than "RQAA" because Into the Night LITERALLY doesn't know what a "chemical" IS.

Into the Night wrote:

Im a BM wrote:
You can go ahead and keep your private definition for "chemical" a SECRET.

GOOGLE isn't afraid to reveal her secrets.

Google inquiry: "What is the definition of 'chemical'?"

She has no reason to keep her answer secret.

Google say: "A chemical is any substance that has a defined atomic or molecular composition. By this scientific definition, virtually anything in the universe is made of chemicals - including the air you breathe, the food you eat, and your own body."

Chemistry is not a secret.
Google is not sentient.
You are not Google.

Im a BM wrote:
Correct, according to what they taught me in college and in grad school for a masters, in grad school for a PhD, and in post doctoral research.

But MOST of those things that Into the Night insists are "not a chemical" are, in fact, CHEMICALS.

Your made up words are not chemicals.

Im a BM wrote:
Perhaps Into the Night will someday share his SECRET definition for the term "chemical", and his thousands of "(name of ion) is not a chemical" statements might actually make sense somehow.

Chemistry is not a secret. You just deny it, whiner.

Im a BM wrote:
We might finally understand WHY Into the Night has formed the OPINION that "carbonate is not a chemical" or "CO3(2-) is not a chemical" "fluoride is not a chemical" "sulfate is not a chemical" "phosphate is not a chemical"...

Actually, it would take me a very long time to list every ION NAME that Into the Night has unilaterally declared to be "not a chemical".

Aren't you supposed to "define your terms" in "science"?

Carbonate is not a chemical.
Fluoride is not a chemical.
Sulfate is not a chemical.
Phosphate is not a chemical.

Im a BM wrote:
Into the Night doesn't DARE answer with anything more clear than "RQAA" because Into the Night LITERALLY doesn't know what a "chemical" IS.

Inversion fallacy.

Im a BM wrote:
See?

He doesn't even PRETEND to know the actual definition for the term "chemical"!

He just keeps using it INCORRECTLY to assert that every ion named in discussion is simply "not a chemical", and therefore he can evade any discussion of the chemical behavior of that ion.

Therefore, "water itself is a buffer for acid", and "carbonate is not a chemical".

CHEMISTRY GENIUS ON DISPLAY FOR MORE THAN 24,000 posts...

Into the Night wrote:

Im a BM wrote:
See?

He doesn't even PRETEND to know the actual definition for the term "chemical"!

He just keeps using it INCORRECTLY to assert that every ion named in discussion is simply "not a chemical", and therefore he can evade any discussion of the chemical behavior of that ion.

Therefore, "water itself is a buffer for acid", and "carbonate is not a chemical".

CHEMISTRY GENIUS ON DISPLAY FOR MORE THAN 24,000 posts...

Inversion fallacy. Whining.

Im a BM wrote: It's bad enough that Into the Night won't allow nitrate, NO3-, to be a "chemical", Into the Night won't even allow agricultural nitrogen fertilizer to be "nitrogen".

Into the Night wrote:

Im a BM wrote:
See?

He doesn't even PRETEND to know the actual definition for the term "chemical"!

He just keeps using it INCORRECTLY to assert that every ion named in discussion is simply "not a chemical", and therefore he can evade any discussion of the chemical behavior of that ion.

Therefore, "water itself is a buffer for acid", and "carbonate is not a chemical".

CHEMISTRY GENIUS ON DISPLAY FOR MORE THAN 24,000 posts...

Inversion fallacy. Whining.

sealover wrote:

Into the Night wrote:

Im a BM wrote:
See?

He doesn't even PRETEND to know the actual definition for the term "chemical"!

He just keeps using it INCORRECTLY to assert that every ion named in discussion is simply "not a chemical", and therefore he can evade any discussion of the chemical behavior of that ion.

Therefore, "water itself is a buffer for acid", and "carbonate is not a chemical".

CHEMISTRY GENIUS ON DISPLAY FOR MORE THAN 24,000 posts...

Inversion fallacy. Whining.

It's bad enough that Into the Night won't allow nitrate, NO3-, to be a "chemical".

Into the Night won't even allow agricultural nitrogen fertilizer to be "nitrogen".

Unfortunately, marine photosynthesis isn't so discriminating about what it allows to act as nitrogen fertilizer.

Nitrogen fertilizer is not monolithic. It could be urea nitrogen, an inorganic carbon diamino compound, with two amino nitrogen (-NH2) groups attached to a carbonyl (-C=O) (the equal sign to show a double bond) group. This is not "organic nitrogen", as the nitrogen is bonded to inorganic carbon.

Nitrogen is often applied by direct injection of dry ammonia gas, NH3. That NH3 is adsorbed to protonated (exchangeable acidity) cation exchange sites as NH4+. With luck, that ammonium, NH4+ gets into the crop roots. Too much of it gets oxidized (aerobically with O2) by nitrifying bacteria, to become nitrate, NO3-. Nitrate does not adsorb to cation exchange sites and is easily lost to leaching into groundwater. Groundwater seeping to surface waters carries the nitrate to aquatic ecosystems to support algae blooms.

What's so bad about an algae bloom? Well, it takes a lot of oxygen to decompose them when they die. Sea water doesn't hold much oxygen, and it's gets depleted easily. Critters that can't swim to where there's enough O2 in the water suffocate and die.

Agricultural nitrogen, which gets to be "nitrogen" by MY definition, can be saltpeter, potassium nitrate, KNO3. This gets you both potassium and nitrogen for your crops. Agricultural nitrogen can be ammonium phosphate, (NH4)3PO4. This gives you both phosphorus and nitrogen for your crop. And very often, agricultural nitrogen is double N by being ammonium nitrate, NH4NO3. Whatever form it is applied in, if nitrogen fertilizer eventually becomes nitrate exported to aquatic ecosystems, it can fertilize algae blooms.

Back in the old days, farms exported virtually no nitrate to surface waters.

The vast majority of nitrogen taken up by crops was supplied by slow mineralization of organic nitrogen in the soil. Some forms of organic nitrogen decompose more slowly than others. Free amino acids can readily be ammonified by microorganisms to release ammonium, NH4+. More recalcitrant forms of organic nitrogen, such as nitrogen bound up in protein-tannin complexes, are very difficult for microorganisms to degrade.

Some farmers used to take the straw bedding from the livestock stables after it was enriched with urine and litter and apply it to the field. The high C:N ratio livestock bedding tied up the "hot" nitrogen in the urine and manure, for slow release. Where they used pine needles or other tannin-rich materials for livestock bedding, they could tie up that urine and manure nitrogen very effectively into a very slow release form to add to the fields.

No algae blooms could be blamed on THOSE farmers.

No "dead zones" were created in any surface waters because of THOSE farms.

On the other hand, if we must INSIST on applying gigatons of nitrogen fertilizer, by doing so a little more EFFICIENTLY we can avoid creating "dead zones".

I don't know what the newer numbers, but in the year 2000, the global average nitrogen fertilizer use efficiency was less than 30% of applied nitrogen actually getting into the target crop's roots.

There were MANY ways to improve upon that.

When or if Patricio comes back, perhaps there will be someone interested in having some intelligent discussion about the topic.

Im a BM wrote:
It's bad enough that Into the Night won't allow nitrate, NO3-, to be a "chemical".

Into the Night won't even allow agricultural nitrogen fertilizer to be "nitrogen".

Unfortunately, marine photosynthesis isn't so discriminating about what it allows to act as nitrogen fertilizer.

Im a BM wrote:
Nitrogen fertilizer is not monolithic. It could be urea nitrogen, an inorganic carbon diamino compound, with two amino nitrogen (-NH2) groups attached to a carbonyl (-C=O) (the equal sign to show a double bond) group. This is not "organic nitrogen", as the nitrogen is bonded to inorganic carbon.

Im a BM wrote:
Nitrogen is often applied by direct injection of dry ammonia gas, NH3. That NH3 is adsorbed to protonated (exchangeable acidity) cation exchange sites as NH4+. With luck, that ammonium, NH4+ gets into the crop roots. Too much of it gets oxidized (aerobically with O2) by nitrifying bacteria, to become nitrate, NO3-. Nitrate does not adsorb to cation exchange sites and is easily lost to leaching into groundwater. Groundwater seeping to surface waters carries the nitrate to aquatic ecosystems to support algae blooms.

Im a BM wrote:
What's so bad about an algae bloom? Well, it takes a lot of oxygen to decompose them when they die. Sea water doesn't hold much oxygen, and it's gets depleted easily. Critters that can't swim to where there's enough O2 in the water suffocate and die.

Im a BM wrote:
Agricultural nitrogen, which gets to be "nitrogen" by MY definition, can be saltpeter, potassium nitrate, KNO3. This gets you both potassium and nitrogen for your crops. Agricultural nitrogen can be ammonium phosphate, (NH4)3PO4. This gives you both phosphorus and nitrogen for your crop. And very often, agricultural nitrogen is double N by being ammonium nitrate, NH4NO3. Whatever form it is applied in, if nitrogen fertilizer eventually becomes nitrate exported to aquatic ecosystems, it can fertilize algae blooms.

Im a BM wrote:
Back in the old days, farms exported virtually no nitrate to surface waters.

Im a BM wrote:
The vast majority of nitrogen taken up by crops was supplied by slow mineralization of organic nitrogen in the soil. Some forms of organic nitrogen decompose more slowly than others. Free amino acids can readily be ammonified by microorganisms to release ammonium, NH4+. More recalcitrant forms of organic nitrogen, such as nitrogen bound up in protein-tannin complexes, are very difficult for microorganisms to degrade.

Im a BM wrote:
Some farmers used to take the straw bedding from the livestock stables after it was enriched with urine and litter and apply it to the field. The high C:N ratio livestock bedding tied up the "hot" nitrogen in the urine and manure, for slow release. Where they used pine needles or other tannin-rich materials for livestock bedding, they could tie up that urine and manure nitrogen very effectively into a very slow release form to add to the fields.

Im a BM wrote:
No algae blooms could be blamed on THOSE farmers.

Into the Night wrote:

Im a BM wrote:
Do you believe in God?

Nitrate is not a chemical.
Nitrogen is not an agriculture.
Nitrogen is not a fertilizer.
Marine is not photosynthesis.

Im a BM wrote:Do you believe the Earth is more than 100,000 years old?

Nitrogen is not fertilizer.
Urea nitrogen is not a chemical.
Carbon is not inorganic.
Carbon is not nitrogen.
Nitrogen is not a protein.
-NH2 is not a chemical.
Carbonyl is not a chemical.
Nitrogen is not organic.
Nitrogen is not carbon.

Im a BM wrote:
Do you believe that bad people go to Hell when they die?

Nitrogen is not ammonia.
Ammonia is not an acid.
NH4+ is not a chemical.
Ammonium is not a chemical.
Nitrifying is not a word.
Nitrate is not a chemical.
Nitrogen is not water.
There is no such thing as 'ecosystem'.
Algae has no bloom.

Im a BM wrote:Does algae have a bloom? What is water made of?

Algae has no bloom.
Seawater contains dissolved oxygen.
Water is also made up of hydrogen and oxygen.

Im a BM wrote:
Is nitrogen agriculture, or is it saltpeter? Are you sure that algae does not have a bloom?

Nitrogen is not an agriculture.
Nitrogen is not saltpeter.
Nitrogen is not potassium nitrate.
Potassium is not potassium nitrate.
Nitrogen is not potassium nitrate.
Nitrogen is not ammonium phosphate.
Phosphorus is not ammonium phosphate.
Nitrogen is not ammonium phosphate.
Nitrogen is not a fertlizer.
Algae has no bloom.

Im a BM wrote:
Would the nitrate ion, NO3-, be considered some kind of "chemical"?

Nitrate is not a chemical.

Im a BM wrote: Is there such a thing as "nitrogen fertilizer"?

Nitrogen is not a fertlizer.
Nitrogen is not a rock.
Nitrogen is not organic.
Nitrogen does not 'decompose'.
Nitrogen is not a protein.
Nitrogen is not an acid.
Ammonified is not a word.
Ammonium is not a chemical.
Tannin is not a chemical.

Im a BM wrote:
Can urine or manure be used to supply "nitrogen" to crops?

Nitrogen is not urine.
Nitrogen is not manure.
Nitrogen is not a pine needle.
Tannin is not a chemical.

Im a BM wrote:
Are you SURE that algae does not EVER have a "bloom"?

Algae has no bloom.