SALINITY IN THE MURRAY-DARLING BASIN.
For both economic and environmental reasons, the importance of Australia's water supply is beyond dispute. Today, more than ever, tackling the issues involving Australia's main water supply, the Murray River, is of great importance. One of the biggest problems in the Murray River is Salinity. Salinity is an excessive concentration of salt in land and water. Salinity is particularly a problem in the Murray-Darling Basin.
The Murray-Darling Basin is a naturally salty environment. The salt comes from weathering rocks and rain, over thousands of years, leaving small amounts of salt. In recent times, human recreational activities have caused the environment to become even saltier. This causes problems for animals as well as agriculture and water supplies in towns. The problem is even worse further downstream where the rainfall is less.
Removal of native grasses, shrubs and trees has not helped the salinity problem. Many deep-rooted plants have been replaced with shallow-rooted crops. These are then watered through irrigation methods, which add large amounts of water to the soil. This causes groundwater (water that lies beneath the surface) to rise and bring salt to the surface. When the water evaporates, the salt is left behind. .
Too much salt in the soil limits the growth of plants and also makes soils more vulnerable to erosion by water. High concentrations of salt in water make the water unsuitable for the survival of many fish and invertebrates and often unsuitable for irrigation, agriculture, and human consumption.
High salinity levels affect everyone. Fixing the problem involves very high costs. Damage to buildings, pipes and roads can become costly. There are also costs to the environment such as destroyed beauty of the land and total loss of some wetlands.
Governments and community groups are trying hard to tackle the salinity problem. Upcoming studies will focus on more sophisticated ways of managing river flows and manipulating weir pool levels, initially to minimise seepage and then to lower groundwater levels.
The Murray and Darling Rivers, the longest river system in Australia, form the Murray-Darling Basin covering more than one million square kilometers or 14 per cent of the mainland area. ... The driest area is the Lake Eyre drainage basin, which averages less than 125 mm annually. ...
Examples are the "cap" on the extraction of water from the rivers of the Murray Darling Basin (Which has relevance to my chosen Newspaper Article) an area which includes inland regions of Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia, and recent plans to restore the environmental health of the Snowy River in the east of Victoria. ... These include climate change due to global warming, salinity and environmental degradation generally. ...
Introduction An economy is a state of a country or region that manufactures and consumes good and services as well as the supply of money. The economy could increase or fall at any at period, so particular strategies need to be used to get through the difficult situations. It depends on the where the economy is standing and what they are aiming for. China is located in Southeast Asia alongside the coastline shore of the Pacific Ocean. It has an area of 9.6 million square kilometers. ...