Is Bangladesh at High Risk of Dead Zone Expansion in the BoB
Author : Afifat Khanam Ritika
13 Feb 2023

It is well known that a team of international scientists, Bristow et al. (2016), have discovered a Dead Zone in the Bay of Bengal (BoB) that is roughly half the size of Bangladesh and is located at depths of 70 meters and below with the minimum oxygen level. Though there is a lot of controversy on the existence of the dead zone in the Bay of Bengal, some astonishing reports on the formation of the dead zone situated in the centre of the Bay of Bengal and already expanded to a massive 6000 square kilometres is an alarm for the world. There were only three significant dead zones, one in the Arabian Sea and two in the eastern tropical Pacific (off Mexico and Peru/Chile). A combined study by the University of Southern Denmark, the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen, Germany, and the National Institute of Oceanography (NIO), Goa, India, adds the newly discovered dead zone in BoB to this list.