Detecting a dead water area thousands of kilometers wide in the Arabian Sea

Scientists fear the situation will be more serious when in the dead waters of Oman Bay there is almost no oxygen.

The newly discovered waters are about the same size as the Mekong Delta, located under the Arabian Gulf.

An exploration robot is exploring dead waters in the Gulf of Oman in the UAE.

Scientists fear the situation will be more serious when in dead waters in the Gulf of Oman almost no oxygen. This area is almost non-existent, considered the largest, as well as the deadliest in the world and is a terrible threat waiting to happen.

Dr Bastien Queste, from the University of East Anglia's School of Environmental Sciences, said: "Even though the sea is full of water, fish and marine life still need a certain amount of oxygen to live, of course they are not. This is a real environmental catastrophe, involving many implications for people who depend on marine food and employment. "

This dead zone also affects the regeneration of nitrogen gas, producing nitrous oxide - a toxic greenhouse gas 300 times more toxic than CO ₂ .

The team deployed two Seaglider robots in the Gulf for eight months to build an overall picture of the amount of oxygen in the sea. This area was previously inaccessible to researchers due to privacy and political concerns.

The robot communicates through satellites, about the size of a human, can dive to depths of up to 1,000 meters and cover an area thousands of kilometers wide.

A Seaglider robot is deployed in the Arabian Sea (UEA).

Boyan Slat explains: "This is a catastrophic disaster that is happening, when climate change gets worse, warm water that lacks oxygen can spread with pollutants emanating from rivers and creating mass destruction of the seas ".

But no one can know how serious the situation has become because scientists are limited to collecting data in countries that control the waters.

"We hardly have any data collected for nearly half a century because we cannot ship here. Our research shows that the situation has really become very bad , " said Boyan Slat. said.

Dead waters are also called "minimum oxygen zones" , often found in some parts of the world at depths from 200m to 800m. But the team found fish in the Gulf of Oman only existed in a thin waters close to the sea surface.

Computer simulations show that the problem may get worse in the century until the water spreads and the amount of oxygen gets worse.