Talk:Hypoxia (environmental)

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[edit] How this page started

The creation of this page started after two suggestions that hypoxia (medical) merge with first hypoxaemia and then with oxygen depletion, which was well developed. David Ruben started a discussion on it. Ex nihil realised that there was a mess of redirects and confusion around hypoxia subjects generally, many of which were rather underdeveloped and subsequently created hypoxia (disambiguation). As part of that process a renaming of oxygen depletion seemed to clarify things a bit. The discussion text can be found at Talk:hypoxia (medical) Ex nihil 01:07, 3 July 2006 (UTC)

• Removed the mergeto|Hypoxia (medical) as this has been a while now without any discussion. Ex nihil 08:14, 18 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Merge multiple hypoxic pages

The hypoxia disambiguation page currently lists the following under environmental:

In the environment:

• Environmental hypoxia at high altitudes the reduced partial pressure of oxygen available to organisms at high altitude leads to hypoxia.
• Environmental hypoxia in sea water or oxygen depletion, a reduced concentration of dissolved oxygen in a water body leading to stress and death in aquatic organisms.
• Hypoxic zones, or dead zones, are hypoxic areas in the world's oceans.
• Anoxic sea water is a condition where there is an abnormally low level of oxygen in the sea.
• The oxygen minimum zone is the depth in the sea at which the disolved oxygen level is lowest, or most hypoxic.

This list might be better if it could be reduced to:

• Hypoxia at high altitude
• Hypoxia (environmental)

...by merging Hypoxic zone, Anoxic sea water and oxygen minimum zone into the existing hypoxia (environmental) At least two of these articles are very brief and suggest a paragraph that might belong better in an expanded Hypoxia (environmental) article. Perhaps this could be done in stages. Any views on this? Ex nihil 04:05, 2 October 2006 (UTC)

• The Hypoxia (environmental) and oxygen minimum zone seem to be well suited to merger. But I quail at merging Anoxic sea water and Dead zone (ecology) which I do not think are the best names for those articles. My own feeling is that Anoxic sea water is really about anoxic basins, rather than the chemistry of anoxic sea water (although the two seem to be rather mixed). I admit that the article needs a great deal of work to make it Anoxic basins, but I do think that the larger, not directly chemical aspects might be drowned in a conjoined article with Hypoxia (environmental) and oxygen minimum zone. Now merging Anoxic sea water with Dead zone (ecology) might be useful, although the Dead zone (ecology) article tends to be about environmental degredation and the creation of dead zones, while the Anoxic sea water article seems to be about naturally occurring ones. Bejnar 05:21, 5 October 2006 (UTC)
• I would oppose merging as these are all different if related subjects; the distinctions between these subjects may very well be lost. The oxygen minimum zone has in fact little to do with hypoxia as it's a natural recurring area in any ocean deep enough and not nearly as extremely oxygen deprived as the hypoxia article talks about, while for the other pages I share the objections of Bejnar above. What I would suggest to do instead, is to remake the hypoxia page, as it is the most general of the pages discussed here, into an overview page for these related but distinct concepts. --Martin Wisse 05:32, 6 October 2006 (UTC)
• I think that a merger would not be easy, and I don't know that it would be beneficial. Whether the pages are merged or not, we'll have to be careful to make clear the distinctions between dead-zones, anoxic basins, minimal oxygen zones, &c. If everything was combined on one page, this would probably mean devoting a section to each concept, which might end up as little more than a cut-and-paste job, with each page imported to the mother article, given its own level-two header (or perhaps level-three, under a level-two header "Types of hypoxia", or something similar) and with few changes made to the text. On the plus side, the intrested reader would find all of the related information in one place, but on the other hand, the redirects could get confusing, and if any of the topics grows, it may need to be split out into its own article again. Leaving the pages separate emphasizes their differences, and prevents us from having to address the redirects, etc, that typically require updating following a merger. So, I guess I'm against the merger, but not very strongly. I'm also not clear on why high altitude hypoxia should be separated out from the aquatic forms in a page labeled environmental hypoxia. --Badger151 00:25, 7 October 2006 (UTC)
• Please do not! My class in school is studying these concepts and they are in completely different units. Wikipedia must keep these separate so I can continue my course, thanks! --75.68.60.17 03:55, 11 December 2006 (UTC)