Gulf of Mexico

From Wikipedia:

The Gulf of Mexico is the eleventh largest body of water in the world.

Considered a smaller part of the Atlantic Ocean, it is an ocean basin largely surrounded by the North American continent and the island of Cuba. It is bounded on the northeast, north and northwest by the Gulf Coast of the United States, on the southwest and south by Mexico, and on the southeast by Cuba.

The shape of its basin is roughly oval and approximately 810 nautical miles wide and filled with sedimentary rocks and debris. It is part of the Atlantic Ocean through the Florida Straits between the U.S. and Cuba, and with the Caribbean Sea (with which it forms the American Mediterranean Sea) via the Yucatan Channel between Mexico and Cuba. With this narrow connection to the Atlantic, the gulf experiences very small tidal ranges.

The gulf basin is approximately 615,000 mi². Almost half of the basin is shallow intertidal waters. At its deepest it is 14,383 ft at the Sigsbee Deep, an irregular trough more than 300 nautical miles long. The basin contains a volume of roughly 660 quadrillion gallons. It was probably formed approximately 300 million years ago as a result of the seafloor sinking.

Pollution
There are frequent "red tide" algae blooms that kill fish and marine mammals and cause respiratory problems in humans and some domestic animals when the blooms reach close to shore. This has especially been plaguing the southwest and southern Florida coast, from the Florida Keys to north of Pasco County, Florida.

In June 1979, the Ixtoc I oil platform in the Bay of Campeche suffered a blowout leading to a catastrophic explosion, which resulted in a massive oil spill that continued for nine months before the well was finally capped. This was ranked as the largest oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico until the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010.

In July 2008, researchers reported that the dead zone that runs east-west, from near Galveston, Texas, to near Venice, Louisiana, was about 8,000 square miles, nearly the record. Between 1985 and 2008, the area roughly doubled in size