There are many ways in which we can stop this waste of space. If it is imperative that we use buildings, it is better that we make them taller rather than wider. This is because wide buildings would disrupt fewer animals. This is might not help plant life in some respects, because the shadow from tall buildings could prevent photosynthesis occurring during the day. To help plants, we could have more garden space, and fewer allotments.
Now to explore the facts of quarrying. Quarrying is an open excavation from which stone or other material is extracted by blasting, cutting, or drilling. As you can see, by using these three means of removing stone, you are directly destroying animals, their habitats, plants, and the environment. Quarrying also uses up precious Earth materials that cannot be easily made again. By using all these materials now, there will not be much left for anyone in say another thousand years. This means we are also ruining all future prospects as well.
There is only one way in which quarrying can be controlled, and that is to only do it in places where there is hardly any life, i.e. deserts. Another not so practical way is to just use resources than can be recycled. My final prospect would be a costly project that deals with intergalactic quarrying, i.e. getting metals from Mars etc.
Farming is one of the largest destroyers of animals and habitats. They obliterate acres of land and millions of animals just to grow plants that are also killed after they have been removed of their crops. Though farming is important for the welfare of us, it is a very wasteful procedure and is not a very good source of our food. We could easily create crops that grow in deserts and crops that grow in places with little nutrients. This could be done and plants harvested without destroying any rainforests, which is being done all the time.
Landfills are basically large holes in the ground that are filled with all the sewage of the world. They are probably the worst pollutants in existence. I think this because they pollute the land to such an extent, that they can no longer sustain any form of life. They destroy whole areas of land and even us if it is not disposed of properly. The filth could easily seep into the ground, killing all life there, and then even into our water streams poisoning them and us at the same time. They could seep into the ocean killing billions of fish and wild life. Whole food webs could be massacred in this way.
There are many solutions to the problem of excess sewage. One would be to construct a large space shuttle and fill it with sewage. Blast it off into the sun, and we would be free of the sewage without destroying the land. It would cost a lot to construct the shuttle, but it would be a lot more cost effective in the long run. It must be disposed of properly however, because if it is just going round the sun there is always the possibility that it will come back. Another solution is creating bacteria to eat the sewage and recycle it into something useful such as oxygen. This may seem fictional, but I am sure that it can be done in thee near future.
Finally I will write about nuclear waste dumps. Below is a diagram about the nuclear waste cycle:
This shows how nuclear waste is processed. Nuclear waste is very lethal if it is disposed of in a way that would mean that it could contaminate things just like landfills can. Obtaining energy from a nuclear source is good because the materials are recycled each time meaning that waste is significantly reduced, and therefore land use is reduced, leaving more for the animals. Below is a diagram of how nuclear waste is treated.
This section is about the greenhouse effect. I will be commenting on the following things:
What it is.
How it is created.
What it does.
Why we need to lessen it.
How to reduce it.
The greenhouse effect is sometimes confused with global warming; they are almost the same thing, except the greenhouse effect is done naturally, whereas global is created by humans. The greenhouse effect is the natural way in which heat is retained on Earth. Global warming is caused by excess retention due to human involvement.
The greenhouse effect refers to the way in which gases in the Earth’s atmosphere warm the Earth like the glass roof of a greenhouse—by letting sunlight in but keeping the reflected heat energy trapped inside. These naturally occurring gases, which are carbon dioxide and water vapour, are called greenhouse gases. A diagram to show this has been drawn below:
The greenhouse effect keeps the temperature of the Earth to a suitable level so that life can exist. Without this effect, the average temperature of the Earth would be about –15º, which is not hot enough to sustain life. One of the main gases that make the greenhouse effect possible, carbon dioxide, is being severely increased, leading to global warming. Also, excesses of methane and nitrous oxide cause it. They are being increased because we are using too many fossil fuels, and we are also the main cause of forest fires, which are occurring too commonly. Forest fires produce a lot of carbon dioxide, but it is doubled, because they can no longer produce oxygen since they are dead, leaving more room for all the other greenhouse gases.
The reason we need to reduce it is simple. If we don’t, then it will get hotter. This may sound good, especially being in England, but it isn’t because the polar icecaps would melt making the world’s oceans rise. This would cause major flooding in all the islands. Also, Britain may even get colder. This is because the new currents may ward off the hot flow of the river, which produces our hot weather in summer. If this isn’t enough, then wait until you read this. The southeast part of England may sink into the ocean along with any other small islands.
To stop this is very simple. All we have to do is stop using cars and any other vehicles that use hydrocarbons, and start using modes of transport that are self sufficient, i.e. bicycles or electric cars. Another possibility would be to use solar power and other renewable sources of energy like tidal energy, wind energy, hydroelectric, and geothermal energy. Geothermal energy is probably the most cost effective and economical so I will now describe it. Geothermal energy harnesses the heat energy contained within the earth. The earth transfers its energy to deep-lying circulating water, which geothermal plants access with wells and pumps. Geothermal energy is attractive because it has a low impact on the environment and is renewable.
When first looking at eutrophication it seems like a good thing, but after researching it carefully I can see that it is just as bad to the environment as any of the other problems. The definition of eutrophication is the process in which a body of water becomes rich in dissolved nutrients, therefore encouraging the growth and decomposition of oxygen depleting plant life, which harms other organisms. Eutrophicaton is a product of nature, but when humans intervene and cause extra nutrients to be dissolved into bodies of water, it is called anthropogenic eutrophication.
This is not the only effect of eutrophication. Not only dos it decrease oxygen supplies, it also causes visual pollution of the water. All the extra nutrients make the water look murky, and make it smell and taste bad. Fish die in it, because there is no oxygen left for them, causing fishing markets to be in a decline. It also costs more money to refine all the extra nutrients from the water for us to drink. This is not all; recreational activities of all humans become impaired.
The causes of this are deforestation, ploughing, and fertilisation. By doing any of these three things, we are increasing the amount of nutrients elsewhere. Deforestation increases the amount of nutrients because the trees contain large amounts of them along with the soil that the roots are entwined with. Ploughing is effectively the same thing because the nutrients are being removed from the soil. Fertilisation adds nutrients to soil, which can easily be washed away into bodies of water via rain. Many other causes are from household equipment, such as detergents. They contain phosphates that can severely alter the state of rivers. On the next page, is a diagram showing the eutrophication of one area occupied by people in a city, industrial estate, and agricultural land. The other is natural land in the form of a forested catchment.
It is quite difficult to remove all these things from a body of water after the damage have been done, but there is still hope for those that have not been polluted yet. We can stop the contamination by reversing the process. Cutting back the phosphorus loads can do this, either by diversion from sensitive waters or by chemical rain using iron salts. This basically strips the phosphates from the water at places like the point sources as the effluents of sewage-works. After minor contamination, these can all help get rid of the eutrophication. Places that have done this include Lake Washington in America, Wahnbach Talsperre in Germany, and Lake Windermere in the United Kingdom. Shallow lakes take longer to restore because they recycle phosphorus much better than deep lakes.
As previously told, this section will look at the different aspects of the ozone layer problem. Ozone is a gas with the chemical formula O3. It is formed when ultraviolet radiation from the Sun splits one oxygen (O2) molecule into two oxygen atoms. The atomic oxygen then combines with another oxygen molecule to form ozone (O3). Most ozone found in the Earth’s atmosphere occurs in one layer in the stratosphere, between altitudes of around 20 to 50 km. The word ozone is Greek and means ‘to smell’. A picture of an ozone molecule being formed is shown below:
A diagram to show the formation of ozone from oxygen atoms is shown below also. This process is called photolysis:
Ozone is a weird molecule because it can either be harmful or helpful depending on where it resides. High in the atmosphere about 15 miles up, ozone acts as a shield to protect Earth's surface from the sun's harmful ultraviolet radiation. Without this shield, we would be more vulnerable to skin cancer, cataracts, and weakened immune systems.
About 90% of all ozone is found in the stratosphere, a layer in the atmosphere that protects us from the suns radiation. When it is on the surface of the earth, or the troposphere however, it becomes a pox3erful pollutant. This section is not focusing on how ozone is a pollutant; it should be focusing on how ozone is being polluted in the stratosphere by humans. I shall now continue with this.
The reason why so much ozone in the atmosphere has been depleted so easily is because of chlorofluorocarbons that come from the exhaust of cars, power plants, industrial boilers, refineries, chemical plants, and other sources react chemically in the presence of sunlight. This is bad because they rise into the stratosphere, and react with UV light; it then displaces a chlorine atom. A chemical equation to show this is below.
CFCl3 + UV Light ==> CFCl2 + Cl
Cl + O3 ==> ClO + O2
ClO + O ==> Cl + O2
The then free chlorine reacts with ozone to form chlorine monoxide and an O2 molecule. The ultra violet radiation breaks this down into just single O atoms, which reacts with the chlorine monoxide to form oxygen (O2) and chlorine. Chlorine is now free to do the same to other ozone molecules. This means it is a catalyst because it is never changed chemically. A chemical equation to show this process is shown below.
Cl + O3 ==> ClO + O2
ClO + O ==> Cl + O2
And again ...
Cl + O3 ==> ClO + O2
ClO + O ==> Cl + O2
And again... for thousands of times.
Now I will be discussing the existence of holes in the ozone layer due to weather patterns changing.
