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From: falk@sun.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.sci,net.bio
Subject: Re: Acid rain damage query
Message-ID: <3605@sun.uucp>
Date: Tue, 29-Apr-86 04:29:18 EDT
Article-I.D.: sun.3605
Posted: Tue Apr 29 04:29:18 1986
Date-Received: Fri, 2-May-86 07:51:50 EDT
References: <202@brl-smoke.ARPA>
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Organization: Sun Microsystems, Inc.
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Xref: watmath net.sci:770 net.bio:421

> Publicity about acid rain indicates that some types of pollution cause
> rainfall to become acidic enough that lakes which collect such rainfall
> eventually themselves turn acidic enough to kill off the natural biota
> and become nearly sterile. How acidic is this? 

When I was in H.S., we had a class called "Environmental Research" in which
we basically learned how to take ecological measurements and do surveys etc.

My assigned sampling site was a stream used by a local town to dump
their (barely) treated sewage.  Not only was it downstream from the sewage
plant, but it was also downstream from a Cott beverage plant and an
asphault plant.  So, we had sewage, sugar and god knows what else being
dumped.

Anyway, the primary measurement of pollution is coliform bacteria, which is
measured in "colonies" per milliliter.  Counts of 100 or so are typical for
reasonably clean water; counts in the thousands is pretty bad.  Well, we
typically got counts around half a million or so for this stream.  One
week however, we got a count of zero.  I was really puzzled (I didn't believe
for a moment that someone had cleaned it up).  My puzzlement lasted about
half an hour, and then we got the pH measurement back -- it was 3.0.

Anyway, I'm from New York state orginally, and acid rain is a real problem
there.  In the early days of ecology conciousness, the EPA set up standards
for pollution emission that were described in terms of concentrations at
a certain distance from smokestacks.  The big coal burners in the Detoit
area answered this not by cleaning up their act, but by building huge
smokestacks so that the pollution would still be airborn when it reached
the sampling distance.  The results were that all of the sulfer and
nitrogen oxides get all the way to NY before they are precipitated out of
the atmosphere by the rain (where they become sulfuric and nitric acids
respectively) and acidify the lakes.  I think the current count is one
third of all NY lakes in mountain regions are sterile or becoming sterile
because of it.
-- 
		-ed falk, sun microsystems