Soil Pollution
Soil can become contaminated in many ways. Chemicals, like herbicides and pesticides, are major polluters; oil dumps, landfills, and industrial wastes can also wreak havoc. But how do these chemicals and oils get into open spaces far away from industrial sites and dumps?
Let’s take a plot of land in Anywhere, USA, as an example. This land houses a small stand of trees, a nice meadow, and a small creek. Long before it reaches our plot, though, the creek runs beneath a hill by a factory. When it rains, water carries factory waste down the hill and into the creek, which carries it to our plot. In addition, there’s a farming operation a hundred miles away from our plot. The farmers use pesticides to protect their crops. However, some of the pesticides evaporate when temperatures rise; the next rainfall brings those chemicals to our plot as acid rain.
As you can see, pollutants can impact soil everywhere. And the effects are potentially disastrous: small chemical changes in soil can render an area inhospitable to plants, virtually eliminating the food chain’s foundation. Also, chemicals that runoff through soil into rivers and streams can contaminate drinking water. For farmers, pollutants can reduce crop yields and lead to heavy erosion.
The effects of pollution on soil are quite alarming and can cause huge disturbances in the ecological balance and health of living creatures on earth. Some of the most serious soil pollution effects are mentioned below.
- Decrease in soil fertility and therefore decrease in the soil yield. Definitely, how can one expect a contaminated soil to produce healthy crops?
- Loss of soil and natural nutrients present in it. Plants also would not thrive in such a soil, which would further result in soil erosion.
- Disturbance in the balance of flora and fauna residing in the soil.
- Increase in salinity of the soil, which therefore makes it unfit for vegetation, thus making it useless and barren.
- Generally crops cannot grow and flourish in a polluted soil. Yet if some crops manage to grow, then those would be poisonous enough to cause serious health problems in people consuming them.
- Creation of toxic dust leading is another potential effect of soil pollution.