Water pollutants

Tuesday, September 15, 2015

8:00 PM

Water - very important for all living things

Humans being no exception
Two general things we can talk about
Quantity of water - finding enough water for humans
Quality of water - finding water not poluted

Nutrients
Causes - phosphates, nitrates )agricultural fertilizer run off)
Sewage (from animal feed lots)
Effect - eutrophication of lakes
Nutrients feed algae algal bloom algae die
Oxygen is removed from water as dead algae are decomposed, fish die
Effect nitrates contamination of drinking water

Pesticides
Cause - agriculture
Effects - contamination of drinking water, biological magnification
Earth has a lot of water - oceans 97% of water available - salt water
Desalimization plants - take salt out of water - pretty expensive
2% of water is as ice

Less than 1% fresh water availble for human use

Finite supply of water
Getting enough water - concern for many of people
Quality water - very important

Many types of water polutant Nutrients

Talking about nutrients for plants
Things like algae and bacteria
Stuff like phosphates and nitrates
Come from fertalizers
Puts on fields to help plant grouth
Phosphates and nitrates - limiting for fields
Run off of agriculture
Carry phosphates and nitrates into water ways
Eutrophication
Other tihng Animal feed lots - sweage from feed lots into waterways
Sewage - source of nitrogen
Phosphates or nitrates -things like algae - potential for algal growth
Algae nutrient limited
Big amounts of nutrients
Grow like mad and have algal bloom
Turn water green

Die
Decomposers try to work on it and suck oxygen out of water
Water less oxygen
Fish sensitive of oxygen levels
Typically die
Eutrophic lake - dying lake
Things like nitrates - water to become drinking water
Contaminate drinking water
Nitrate - formula made from water
Snow melt and a lot of run off into rivers and streams
Nitrate contamination more important

Pesticides Agruculture and use of pesticides

Run off from agrucultural fields use for drinking water
Contamination of drinking water
Pesticides - not fully determined
Some indications Astrocine - herbocide Produce chemicals - mimics of hormones in organisms Male and female differentiation
Very low levels
Hormones - not high concentraiton
Low levels in water

Get organisms being affected in various ways

Amphibians or reptiles like aligators
Feminization of males
Males that don't act like males and don't mate with females
Has serious consequences if individuals aren't mating
Result of pesticides - ddt
Biological magnification
When pesticides get into ecological systems
As we move up the trophic levels
Higehr and higher concentraitons in organisms

Added limiting nutrient

Algae - phosphorus and grow like crazy
Light green color on lower half

Due to algal bloom

Let this continue - this side of lake - eutrophic lake

Water problems - irrigation

Reduce aquifiers
Salinization
10% of water - used for household use
70% for irrigation and irrigated crops
Produced a lot of food 40%
Tied together
Problem is that we are irrigating at rate that such we are depleting aquifers
Aquifers - water trapped underground
Water can be obtained from veriety of sources
Rivers streams lakes
Aquifers - trapped for long period of time
Or may be recharged at slow rate
Happenening - water is being depleted from aquifers faster than recharge rate
Aquifers being depleted - no irrigation in those rate
Food production goes down
Second problem irrigation Salinization
Half of all water in irrigation is lost because of evaporation and run off
When water evaporates - leaves behind mineral deposits
Glass of water on windowsill - evaporate -

White film around glass

Minerals that were in water and they were left behind as water evaporates
Those minerals form salts and create a very salty soil
Area irrigated lots of irrigation
Mineral salts
Salty soil
Plants simply cant grow in them anymore
Two problems
Reducing aquifers - reduce food production
Contaiminating soil

Ogalla and other aquifers

Area that covers from north - up in dakotas to texas

Formed when rocky mountains were made

Run off from rocky mountains to gravely types of soil that are quite deep
Sponge holding lot of water
This part of country
Lots of irrigation to keep crops growing
Delpleted much more rapidly
Water table have gone down tens of feed - even hundreds of feed
To deplete aquifer - not sustainable way to do agriculture
Slowed - more efficient means of irrigating crops
More efficient ways of spaying water
Irrigation in troughs drip irrigation
Aquifer in serious trouble, but people are thinking of ways of preserving aquifer

Land degradation
One thing happening to lots of areas in world
Desertification
Taking the land and turning it into desert - nothing very productive for growing crops
or anything else
Three basic ways Overgrazing - too many cattle on land - cattle eating vegetation down close to
ground
Killing vegetation
Creating big open areas
Subjected to windstorms and erosion
Overcultivation - keep growing corps on area and don't stablize area - soil
dissapears - taken away by wind or runoff by rain

Iowa - rich agricultural area

Top soiol - lost - 16 inches of topsoil to about 8 inches
Don't want this to continue
If agriculture over last 100 years - reduced by half
If process continue
Iowa become destert
Deforestation
50% of tropical rain forest gone
Loss of biodiversity
Reduces precipitation
Lets area go - treess can come back in
But in many places - torpical rain forests
Cut down rain forest
Slash and burn agriculture
Grow crops - limited amount of time
Soil can't produce more - limited organic content
Soil depleted from nutrients trees cant grow back
Trpical rainforests - much biodiversity
Deforestation - climate patters - effected by vegetation on ground
Very little on ground - precipitation is reduced
Start creating desrt areas
Increasing move towards desertification

Slash and burn -

Coming in first - cutting down most trees

Setting fire to what you cut down to clear away logs and so on
Grow crops

Sustainability If human species maintain itself

Must find someway to take care of wastes so we don't polute our air water land
Find energy sources that are sustainable to keep our machinery going
Produce food in sustainable ways to produce over periods of time
This point of time - people are looking ahead 50 to 100 years
Hard to think ahead of this
Extrapolate ahead
See that certainly certain problems need to be solved

Wastes Solid wastes paper 40%

Yard waste 20%
Plastic 10%
Options
Landfill - a lot is simply burried
Compost - yard waste
Burn
Recycle reuse - plastics and paper
Hazardous wastes

Safe storage

Some parts of country - finding big holes to bury in is very difficult

New york - new jersey
Landfils - big whole in ground with stuff in it
Get leeching going on as rainfall percelates through landfill
Makes chemicals
Keep chemicals from getting into water and contaiminating driking water

Compost - in ames iowa

Solid wastes burned and energy is generated from that to run eletricity and heat
homes
Some materials recycled and reused - success in doing this varies depending on
what kind of item you are talking about
Paper and glass - successful
Plastic - lot of plastic
Many kinds of plastic
Cheaper - to make new plastic than to recycle plastic you have
Hazardous waste - industry, power plants, nuclear power plants
We in our household have many kinds of hazardous waste - use for herbocides or
waste oil
Where does it go how do we store it
Difficult questions no easy answer

Sources of energy

Developing countries - from fossil fuels

Wood - developing countries
Wood for household use
Led to asian brown cloud Led to deforestation in many areas
In efforts to get enough firewood - live and dead trees

Energy Fossil fuels reserves - finite

Oil and gas - about 100 years
Coal - 300 years
Effeccts of mining
Run out at some point
Have to mine them - environmental consequences for that

Nuclear
Once seen as hope for the future
Interest cooled because of safety concerns
Chernobyl meltdown
Nuclear waste disposal
Fusion?
Well into the future
Materials used in nuclear power production that are finite
Interest has cooled quite a bit - various safety concerns
Meltdowns - nuclear power plants chernobyl
Near meltdowns - near mile island in us
Scary to people
Nuclear power plants - quite a bit of radiocative waste - contineu to be radioacctive
for thousands of years
Put it out of harms way
In us In navada - yucca mountain
Very stable mountain
Where you put this
Be resonabaly certain where it won't break open
Very dry - no water damage to leech things into ground water
One posibility
Fusion Fusion is a way of producing energy which is what sun does to produce energy
Doesn't have radioactive consequences

Not possible to produce fusion in even laboratory to put in more energy than you
get out

Chernobyl nuclear accident

Chernobyl in ukraine Particular power plant - mealtdown in april of 1986

Pictures you see at top
Spread of radioactive material
As time goes on
Nuclear cloud over large area
Many people - radioactive material
Crops - destroyed
People killed at time of mealtdown - go in and defuse situation and got radiation
poisioning

Neraby villages - affected

Higher rates of cancer in these areas
Very serious thing

Solar and wind - one possibility

Move away from fossil fuel and nuclear plants
Sustainable Solar and wind energy
Wind always blowing
Renewable resource
Windmills to this - generate power
Wind farm - turbine
Iowa - wind farms - generate substantial amount of energy
Not quite as economic at this point as burning fossil fuels
Economics of this situation
Watt of power from windmill costs more
Lots of environmental costs from fossil fuels - not added in
Wind cheaper in long run
Solar - sustainable
Particular areas - sun shining quite a bit during the year
Volcaiac cells
Turn sun into electricity
Technology advancing - at this point
Solar power - more expensive than fossil fuel sources

Food - continue to have human population operating is food

How to provide for population growth - presently on earth, likely to be here over
next 50-100-200-beyond years
Serveral possible ways to response in population growth
Increase the amout of land in production Already near limit loss of land due to desertification - lot of land - already in
agricultural production
Don't want to chop down land due to desertification
Increase the productivity of the land currently in production
Green revolution productivity near limit
More bushels of corn/soy beans
Green revolution 1950s - breeding crops - more efficient at producing seeds
Fertalizer use
Errigation
Food producation almost doubled over a short period of time
Point - production - platau
Gotten about all we can get in increase fertilization
Irrigation
Genetically improved vareity of crops
Keep up with population growth - double production to feed everyone
Very difficult to do
Genetic engineering to produced more productive than they are
Can't really double - with genetically enginnered crops
One thing we can do -

Eat lower on the food chain - instead of eating meat - we eat more vegetables and
grains Know that there is 90% reduction from one trophic level to next in what is available
Grow up and become carnivors 1/10 of that left
10 times more people - off of vegetarians than strictly carnivors