Huge ‘dead zone’ found in Bay of Bengal

The Bay of Bengal hosts a ‘dead zone’ of an estimated 60,000 square kilometres – an area that contains little or no oxygen and supports microbial processes that remove vast amounts of nitrogen from the ocean, scientists including those from India have found.

Dead zones are well known off the western coasts of North and South America, off the coast of Namibia and off the west coast of India in the Arabian Sea.

“The Bay of Bengal has long stood as an enigma because standard techniques suggest no oxygen in the waters, but, despite this, there has been no indication of nitrogen loss as in other ‘dead zones’ of the global ocean,” said Laura Bristow, a former postdoc at University of Southern Denmark.