Pinnacle NFS Study Guide
For January MTs
MT RANGE:
Pg. 132-136 – Unit 4.3 Soil and Human Activities
Pg. 115-120A – Unit 5.1 Erosion
MAKE SURE YOU KNOW THE FOLLOWING:
Unit 4.3 Soil and Human Activities (Pg. 132-136):
Soil is a necessary resource for human survival. It is useful because
it is necessary for plants to grow, because it helps recycle nutrients
and because it helps absorb and filter pollutants in the water. Soil
is important for sustaining life on Earth.
Many common human activities can be very harmful to the soil.
One way that we harm the soil is through the use of fertilizers.
Fertilizers are chemicals and mixes that we apply to the soil to
make it easier for plants to grow in it. However, while most
fertilizers are helpful in the short term, over long periods of time
they can make the soil worse. This is because fertilizers make it
hard for microorganisms in the soil to produce nutrients naturally,
causing the soil to be less fertile over time.
Another way that we harm the soil is by removing the plants that
grow on it through overgrazing or through clearing the land for
farming or building. Without plants to cover and hold the soil in
place, it will quickly blow or wash away. In dry areas, this can
cause desertification, since the loss of plant cover will cause the
good, fertile soil to wash away and be replaced by dry, unusable
soil.
Mining can also harm the soil. In order to get to the resources that
we want to mine, we usually have to dig out and remove lots of soil
and plant cover to get to those resources. This has several other
bad side effects too, including the fact that chemical weathering is
increased by mining (due to more surface area being exposed to
air/water) and mining exposes the soil to toxic sulfide minerals and
pollutes it.
Despite this, there are several ways that we can use to conserve
and save the soil. One common method is crop rotation, which
involves growing different crops with each harvest – for example,
growing wheat first, then rice, then potatoes, then carrots, and then
growing wheat again. Doing this will keep the soil fertile by
controlling how much nutrients that crops take out of the soil and
allowing the soil to restore nutrients like nitrogen so that plants can
grow well.
Another way to conserve the soil is by using terracing and contour
plowing. Both of these methods are used on sloping land (hills,
mountains, etc.) and both prevent rainwater from washing soil
down the mountain, which keeps the soil on the mountain fertile.
Unit 5.1 – Erosion
Erosion occurs when weathered rock particles are moved and then
placed somewhere else. The three main things that cause erosion
are water, wind and ice.
Gravity also plays a role in erosion. For example, gravity will cause
sediments carried by wind to fall to the Earth when the wind slows.
It can also cause mass wasting, which is what happens when large
amounts of material is moved at once.
Mass wasting can happen either suddenly or gradually. Scientists
use the speed at which mass wasting happens, along with the type
of material that is involved, to classify mass wasting events.
Landslides are formed when large amounts of dirt and rock from a
hill or mountainside become unstable and suddenly roll down the
mountain all at once. These can be very destructive, burying and
destroying anything in their path.
Rockslides and rockfalls can be dangerous too. Rockfalls occur
when one or two individual rocks break off of bigger rocks and roll
down a mountain. Rockfalls are common, but they don’t cause
much damage. Rockslides are like rockfalls but involve a great
number of rocks rolling down the hill at once. These cause much
more damage than rockfalls, but thankfully are much rarer as well
since they only happen because of earthquakes.
Mudflows are very destructive and are caused either by heavy rains
in mountainous areas or by snow-covered volcanoes erupting.
When volcanoes erupt, the heat from the eruption melts all the
snow on the peak. The water rushes down the hill and mixes with
the soil from the mountain and ash from the eruption to create a
mud-like substance. These mudflows are very dangerous because
they can quickly bury anything in their path.
Slump and creep are mass wasting events that happen much more
slowly than the above things. Slump occurs when soil is made
unstable by things like highways through mountains and building
projects. Slump will cause the ground to move slowly down the hill
or mountain. Creep is even slower than slump, only moving at a
few millimeters per year. The only way we can tell that creep is
even happening is when we see signposts, mailboxes, fenceposts,
etc. that are leaning forward.