Underwater robots find vast ‘dead zone’ in the Gulf of Oman

Monitoring the health of the sea is an important job for environmental scientists. The interaction between ocean and atmosphere is important for the climate, and the seas are a vital source of income for many communities and nations. The Arabian Sea has been inaccessible to scientists for some years, because of geopolitical tensions and piracy. However, the University of East Anglia recently sent two robotic probes to the Gulf of Oman to collect data, and the results are highly worrying.

It was already known that the Arabian Sea was a low oxygen area. “Dead zones are areas devoid of oxygen. In the ocean, these are also known as 'oxygen minimum zones' and they are naturally occurring between 200 and 800 meters deep in some parts of the world,” said Bastien Queste from UEA's School of Environmental Sciences, who led the research in collaboration with Oman's Sultan Qaboos University. "They are a disaster waiting to happen – made worse by climate change, as warmer waters hold less oxygen, and by fertiliser and sewage running off the land into the seas.”