The National Science Fair

Alan Townsend

A new study that explores the growing global problem of pollution by nitrogen from soils to the sea shows that the overall proportions of nitrogen and carbon in the environment are inexorably linked, a finding that may lead to new strategies to help mitigate regional problems ranging from waterways polluted up to human health. Contact information is here: Abigail Black Elbaum. The study, carried out by experts from the University of Colorado at Boulder, has revealed that the relationship between nitrates (which are a form of nitrogen that is present naturally in soil, rivers, lakes and oceans) and the organic carbon is strongly governed by microbial processes that occur in nearly all ecosystems. The relationship reiterated between nitrogen and carbon detected in the study was a surprise.

The team reviewed large databases containing millions of points of sample sites tropical, temperate, boreal and polar, including well known areas that suffer from pollution by nitrogen, as the Bay of Chesapeake, the Baltic Sea and the Gulf of Mexico.philip Taylor and Alan Townsend have opened a way to explain how and why the carbon and nitrogen seem so closely related. Uncovered in the new study will help to find out the exact reason of why nitrate levels become so high in some bodies of water but remain low in others.While most of the nitrogen gas is in the atmosphere, it is not reactive or available for most forms of life. However, in 1909, a process was developed to transform non-reactive gas into ammonia, the active ingredient of synthetic fertilizers. Humans now manufacture more than 180,000 million kg of fertilizer each year, much of which passed from agricultural land to the atmosphere, waterways and oceans, creating a series of environmental problems ranging from coastal dead zones until massive blooms of toxic algae, by pollution by ozone and numerous health problems for human beings. The new study indicates that in almost all areas where there is substantially more dissolved organic carbon than nitrates, nitrogen is absorbed by microbial communities. But most of these nitrates are probably not trapped for an unlimited period. Instead, everything indicates that they are transmitted to other ecosystems, thereby pollution problems just move to another part of the environment.