Soil Pollution — Flashcards

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Soil is a natural medium for plant growth made up of minerals (45%), organic matter (5%), air (25%), and water (25%). It serves as a habitat for many organisms like worms, insects, and bacteria, and s…

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Soil formation is a long, complex process taking 100 to 10,000 years to create one inch of topsoil. It is driven by climate, topography, living organisms, and parent material. Parent materials break d…

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The three main soil properties are: 1) Physical properties (texture, structure, porosity) - regulate air and water movement; 2) Chemical properties (pH, nutrient availability) - determine what can gro…

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Soil pollution is the addition of substances that adversely affect soil quality or fertility. Unlike air and water pollution which can be reduced when right atmospheric conditions arrive, soil polluti…

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Biodegradable wastes include substances that can be degraded by microbes into harmless substances (plant/animal wastes, leaves, paper). Non-biodegradable wastes cannot be easily degraded (plastics, al…

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Chemical fertilizers contaminate soil with impurities from raw materials (As, Pb, Cd from rock phosphate). Overuse of NPK fertilizers reduces crop quality and protein content, decreases vitamins in fr…

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Biomagnification is the process where toxic chemicals become increasingly concentrated as they move up the food chain. Example: DDT starts at 0.04 ppm in producers (phytoplankton), increases to 0.23 p…

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DDT was banned because it: 1) Persists in the environment without decomposing readily, 2) Is fat-soluble and biomagnifies up the food chain, 3) Disrupts calcium metabolism in birds causing thin, fragi…