Introducing
Your new presentation assistant.
Refine, enhance, and tailor your content, source relevant images, and edit visuals quicker than ever before.
Trending searches
Soil erosion is at an all time high and, like all actions that disrupt the Earth’s lithosphere and pedosphere, is detrimental.
Soil erosion has occurred in three major surges.
Movement under the Earth’s crust is natural and normal and has shaped the Earth since its beginning. These forces can cause disasters among mankind, but nothing compared to the adverse effects that man had on the Earth through mining and accelerated erosion.
Mining was done in search of metals and fuels.
In the Middle East, India and China in the 2000 B.C. and 1000 A.D. vegetation was burned to clear forests.
Mining harms the lithosphere, filling the water supplies with fine materials usually slurry (a mixture of manure, cement, and coal) and silt (sand and clay). Silt grew by the 10-fold as a result of hydraulic gold mining.
"Our most consequential impacts occurred in the soil: we simultaneously corroded and enriched the substrate of civilization, so that some could soon bear nothing at all, while others eventually seemed able to bear, if not all things, at least a lot more of many different things."
Our Earth’s crust, specifically the lithosphere and pedosphere includes the outer shell and the soil which are extremely susceptible to the actions of mankind and over the centuries, it has taken a great toll. The state of the soil, pollution, mining, and erosion are the ways that will be focused on and how they are damaging the Earth’s skin.
Pollution is bad for soil, yet countries still used practices that seep contaminants into soil and are harmful to mankind, as well as other life.
Booming, industrial countries contributed to soil contamination through the dumping of toxin waste onto to foreign lands.
Farmers and agronomists have spent a great deal of time altering the chemistry of the soil to “make bad soil good, good soil better, and profit from it.”
When Europeans invaded the Americans with new agricultural practices and newly introduced animals there was an increased the loosening of the soil, resulting in erosion.
The practice of mining meant displacing rock and sometimes beheading mountains.
Artificial fertilizer was used during the Great Depression to replenish the soil in an inexpensive manner.
The effects of such unnatural movement caused many problems because of the way in which nickel is extracted.
At the same time, smelting metals clogged the air with poisonous gases and smoke.
The use of copper infiltrated corn fields, mining and smelting introduced heavy metals into some vegetation which led to a bone disease.
This caused numerous health problems and the killing of vegetation around the world. In the mid-1970s, regulations were put in place to lessen the impact that these metals were having on entire environments.
In trying to accomplish this, they depleted the soil of necessary nutrients.
Larger, richer countries began paying poorer countries to take their toxins away.
Different parts of the world have different nutrients, so countries began trading soil.
As a result, nitrogen and phosphorus were diminished in several areas, which meant that plants weren't able to grow to their full potential.
This is especially true with certain crops, such as sugar, cotton and maize, because if not rotated properly, they all exhaust the supply of nutrients.
For example, the United States began transporting their chemical wastes by ship across the Atlantic Ocean trying to find land to dump their toxins.
This soil additive, for some time, did allow to grow more plants faster without destroying the pedosphere, but it took out small farms because it became harder to afford and required more labor.
This had unforeseen side effects to the people and plants surrounding the companies discarding such toxins.
The use of heavy machinery increased soil erosion through compaction due to new technologies that weighed more than ever before.
The use of legumes along side of the distillation of superphosphate, which takes nitrogen from the air and puts it into the soil again, seems like a simple task to help save the nutrients in the soil, but it can be expensive and laborious.
These damaging and deadly actions did not slow down quickly as the industrial revolution made producing these horrible effects happen even faster with the help of new technologies such as the bulldozer, hydraulic shovels and 40-ton trucks.
In 1980, the government officially claimed Love Canal a natural disaster site. This brought light to the problem of the possible harmful, even deadly consequences of such actions and allowed other locations to draw a link between mysterious diseases and chemical dumping sites.
One of the biggest influences artificial fertilizer had was on the water supplies surrounding the farms.
Before 1909, only lightning and the roots of legumes were able to introduce nitrogen to soil, then chemist Fritz Haber discovered a way to take nitrogen out of the air through ammonia synthesis.
This led to, once again, hindering the soil’s ability to adequately grow plants.
When the dislocation of mass amounts of rocks began causing additional issues, governments stepped in and wrote up regulations.
This led to agriculture that was able to prosper and fully develop even in the depleted nutrient soil.
These changes, over time, resulted with runoff and excessive flooding.
Modern armed forces' use of synthetic chemicals is the single greatest contaminator of soils in the 1940s.
After 1975 and as a result of the boom of industry in Europe, North America, and Japan to Korea, Taiwan, Brazil, and elsewhere, soil pollution problems spread because more people populated smaller areas.
This is why in our current societies there is a lack of variety in foods, for example, “two-thirds of our grains now come from three plants: rice, wheat, and maize.” The chemicals used in artificial fertilizers make produce dependent on fossil fuels, or oils, as well as sunlight.
This all resulted in some much-needed regulations, and by the 1990s, most of the international trading of toxins was made illegal.
Plant breeding and fertilizer, although both helpful, also have their limits.
"So all that degraded, eroded, compacted, paved over, and contaminated soil may yet be missed -- especially if freshwater or energy constraints begin to pinch, driving up the costs of irrigation and fertilizer."
If we keep at this pace, we will need more land, fertilizer and better crops which are all expensive and labor intensive.
We get 97% of our food supply from this soil, establishing ways to replenish and restore to it is a necessity.