It's the size of Connecticut, and it's suffocating everything in sight.

Called the Gulf of Mexico dead zone, it's a stretch of water low in oxygen off the coasts of Louisiana and Texas, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Scientists map the area every year to track the changes in its size, and during a recent survey cruise, they found this summer's dead zone measures 5,052 square miles, the report added.

West of the Mississippi River, a dead zone – water that contains low oxygen levels – has formed.

(NOAA Photo)

That's just a few square miles larger than Connecticut, which checks in at 5,018 square miles.

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The dead zone is responsible for fish displacement, habitat loss and even a decline in reproductive abilities of some species, a NOAA-funded study found. This can alter the ecosystem used by many commercial and recreational fisheries that operate businesses off the Gulf Coast, the report adds.

For some deep-water species, the dead zone is even worse, according to a CNN report. Inside the "hypoxic zone," some life forms aren't able to make it out and die, the report explains.

The dead zone is human-caused, scientists say. When agricultural fertilizer, wastewater and other nutrients travel down the Mississippi River and into the Gulf of Mexico, algae blooms expand, sucking oxygen out of the water, NOAA says.

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Scientists have been working for years to reduce the size of the Gulf dead zone, which is currently the second-largest human-caused coastal dead zone in the world, the report adds. This summer's Gulf dead zone is far smaller than the largest one ever recorded– 8,481 square miles– but it's not far from the five-year average of 5,500 square miles, according to NOAA.

Even though the dead zone shrunk from 2013's recorded size of 5,840 square miles, scientists were hoping to reduce the dead zone's size to 1,900 square miles by 2015, the CNN report added.

"The average we're targeting against is three times the goal. ... There hasn't been any progress in reaching that goal," saidNancy Rabalais, executive director of the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium and the survey's leader, in the CNN report.

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