Distinguish between natural and cultural eutrophication. |...

Name: Problem 11, Chapter 20: Environmental Science: Toward a Sustainable Future
Uploaded: 2020-06-10T22:38:29-08:00
Duration: 6 min 33 s
Channel: Dennis Howard
Description: Distinguish between natural and cultural eutrophication.

Key Concepts

Eutrophication

Eutrophication refers to the process by which water bodies, such as lakes or rivers, become enriched with nutrients (especially nitrogen and phosphorus). This enrichment can stimulate excessive growth of algae and aquatic plants, leading to a range of ecological consequences, including decreased oxygen levels, loss of biodiversity, and degradation of water quality.

Natural Eutrophication

Natural eutrophication is a process that occurs over long periods as a result of natural environmental and ecological processes. It involves the gradual accumulation of nutrients from natural sources like soil erosion, weathering of rocks, and decaying vegetation, resulting in a slow change in the aquatic ecosystem's productivity and structure.

Cultural Eutrophication

Cultural, or anthropogenic, eutrophication is driven by human activities that accelerate the nutrient loading in aquatic systems. This typically involves the runoff of fertilizers from agricultural lands, effluent from wastewater treatment plants, and other industrial discharges. The rapid increase in nutrient levels due to these activities leads to accelerated and often detrimental ecological changes, such as algal blooms and hypoxic conditions.

Transcript

00:01 This question asks, analyze the difference between freshwater algae and marine algae.

00:08 So let's think about the difference between just the terms freshwater and marine.

00:13 When we talk about something that is freshwater, we are referring to usually a hypotonic solution, whereas marine or salt water is going to be an isotonic solution.

00:31 And what do we mean by isotonic and hypotonic? well, if we have just a beaker right here, and it's going to have a water level in here, and we are going to take actually this piece of, actually two pieces of sodium, table salt, and we're going to put them into this beaker.

00:59 So now we are going to have ions, sodium ions and chloride ions, within the beacons.

01:06 And now let's take a look at the same beaker, but now we are going to dissolve, it's going to be the same beaker with the same amount of water, but now we're going to dissolve 100 of these.

01:26 So now we're going to have 100 and a pluses and 100 cl minuses.

01:32 So compared to the beaker on the left, the one on the right would be hypertonic because there there would be a high solute or sodium chloride or just dissolved ion concentration.

01:56 Now if we are to look at the beaker on the left we see that it is going to be hypotonic.

02:02 That is because it's going to have a low solute.

02:05 Once again in this case we are talking about these sodium and chloride ions.

02:12 And what would be isotonic? well an isotonic solution is if we are going to take, once again the same beaker with the same amount of water and we are going to put a hundred of these sodium chloride salt crystals in there so we'll produce a hundred n a plus ions and 100 cl minus ions this solution is going to be isotonic to this solution because they will have same solute concentration right because in each case we have the same amount of water and the same amount of salute or sodium chloride that is dissolved in that water.

03:00 So therefore both are going to be isotonic.

03:02 Now compared, if we take this one and we compare it to the hypotonic or the one on the left, this one is going to be hypertonic, whereas this one is hypotonic.

03:13 So all of these tonicities and just these comparisons are going to be just that.

03:18 A comparison.

03:19 We can't just say something is hypertonic, hypotonic, isotonic, without being able to compare to something else...

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