The Riviera Maya News article mentioned above, infers a limited rotational park opening that could be the next step. More news expected in the next couple of days.
This morning, I found an interesting article on coral bleaching that has occurred in the Florida Keys and has started in Cozumel. Here’s a snippet from that article, “Between 1991 to 1995, significant increases in Everglades runoff and heavy rainfall resulted in increases of
reactive nitrogen and phytoplankton levels at Looe Key above levels known to stress and cause die-off of coral reefs.“
The article noted that coral bleaching is caused in part by reactive nitrogen and exacerbated by increases in water temperature, not by increasing water temperature alone.
After reading this article, I now can feasibly understand why the park was closed to assess reactive nitrogen level water quality data, from the Marine Park while it was fully in use (by divers & dive boats) and after the park was closed and void of divers and dive boats. The closed data might also be an indicator of the alleged SW island resort water pollution (reactive nitrogen) alone.
Hopefully when the Marine Park reopening news is released in the coming days, they will provide justification for their past and planned actions with a report on their research efforts. Hopefully they’ve already discussed their approach and plans in some level of detail.
On a related front...........We’ve all laughed about diver urination causing coral bleaching. After my read today, I’m thinking it would be interesting to see some realistic worse case calculations on water reactive nitrogen levels from “divers” to understand that level of worse case impact.
