Transport of Water Pollutants
By: Shaelynn
We rely on clean water to survive, and yet we are heading towards a water crisis. Changing climate patterns are threatening lakes and rivers, and key sources that we tap for drinking water are being overdrawn or tainted with pollution. Water pollution is a change in chemical, physical, and biological health of a water resource. Water pollution falls under two categories, point sources and nonpoint sources of pollution. A point source originates from a single source, such as a sewage outflow pipe that discharges directly into a body of water. A nonpoint source is a contamination that occurs from sediments, nutrients, or organic or toxic substances from land-use activities are carried into lakes and streams by surface run-off.
Water pollution is caused by many things, including, industrial waste, sewage and waste water, mining activities, marine dumping, accidental oil leakages, burning of fossil fuels, and many more. Waste that is dumped into lakes or rivers can be carried by a current into the ocean, thousands of kilometers away from the original dump site. Polluted water can harm fish and other aquatic life that are exposed to the pollution, or that consume it. Due to this exposure, aquatic species may encounter reproductive difficulties, or death. Water pollution affects the entire food chain in two ways, through bioaccumulation and biomagnification/bioamplification.
Bioaccumulation occurs in an organisms, where a concentration of a substance builds up in the tissues and is absorbed faster than it is removed. This often occurs in two ways, simultaneously: by eating contaminated food, and by absorption directly from water(also called bioconcentration). Bioamplification is an increase in the concentration of a substance as you move up the food chain, often by persistent pollutants that don’t or slowly do break down by natural processes. These persistent pollutants are transferred up the food chain faster than they are broken down or excreted.
Due to bioaccumulation in aquatic life, humans have been affected by biomagnification, simply by consuming fish with mercury poisoning. Back in the 1950s, at Minimata Bay in Japan, industrial production concentrated mercury in fish to the extent that 900 people died, and some 20 000 became ill, as a result of consuming the contaminated fish. So, what will you do to stop water pollution, cause the next individual to experience death or illness due to consuming polluted fish could be you.
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