Kenneth R. Weiss, a Los Angeles Times staff member since 1990, began reporting on the Ocean’s Dead Zones in 2005.
He traveled to Australia, Panama, Jamaica, Midway, Palmyra Atoll and the Hawaiian Islands; and up and down the coasts of California, Washington, Florida and Georgia.
He came back with a story that reads like science fiction (MP-3). The 5-part series won a prestigious George Polk Award.
The venomous weed, a strain of cyanobacteria, an ancestor of modern-day bacteria and algae that flourished 2.7 billion years ago, has appeared in at least a dozen other places around the globe. It is one of many symptoms of a virulent pox on the world’s oceans.
In many places — the atolls of the Pacific, the shrimp beds of the Eastern Seaboard, the fiords of Norway — some of the most advanced forms of ocean life are struggling to survive while the most primitive are thriving and spreading.
Where this pattern is most pronounced, scientists evoke a scenario of evolution running in reverse, returning to the primeval seas of hundreds of millions of years ago.
The ancient seas contained large areas with little or no oxygen — anoxic and hypoxic zones that could never have supported sea life as we know it.
Years ago, Rabalais popularized a term for this broad area off the Louisiana coast: The Dead Zone. “There are tons and tons of bacteria that live in dead zones,” Rabalais said. “You see this white snot-looking stuff all over the bottom.”
These microbes have been barely noticeable for millions of years, tucked away like the pilot light on a gas stove. “Now the stove has been turned on.”
From the snowy slopes on Mount Kilimanjaro, the crowded delta of Bangladesh, the outskirts of Auckland, New Zealand, and elsewhere, 11 journalism students reported on real-life perils caused by global warming (MP-3).
AMERICA’S INVESTIGATIVE REPORTS is a production of WNET New York in association with the Center for Investigative Reporting. The Peabody Awards, the oldest honor in electronic media, do not recognize categories nor is there a set number of awards given each year. The 2007 Pulitzer Prize winners will be announced on Monday, April 16, 2007.
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