Water Cycle
What is evaporation?
This process exists with or without people. When intensified by pollution of greenhouse gasses, specifically from fossil fuels, this process causes global warming.
What is the greenhouse effect?
These organisms are directly responsible for converting nitrogen from the atmosphere and soil to usable forms of nitrogen for plants to absorb. Without these crucial organisms, plants and humans would be unable to acquire nitrogen.
What are decomposers? What are bacteria?
This term refers to the raising of animals for food and resources. It is often paired with farming where crops are produced for food supply.
What is grazing?
This substance cycles through the environment through living and non-living processes and consistently cycles through it's 3 main forms depending on temperature and weather. It is a crucial substance for the intake of nutrients and all living organisms must intake this substance regularly for effective cell functioning.
What is water?
The process of water molecules joining together due to changes in pressure and temperature resulting in the formation of clouds. Typically this process indicates soon-to-occur precipitation.
What is condensation?
These 2 categories of organisms are responsible for recycling living carbon back to the soil for usage from plants. Both organisms break down dead materials; 1 uses chemicals while the other uses it's mouth.
In the ocean, these organisms are also responsible for depositing carbon at the bottom of the ocean, which can form rocks over time.
What are decomposers and detritivores?
This weather event naturally puts nitrogen from the air into the soil.
What is lightning?
This agricultural method refers to growing one species of plant or crop in the same location season after season.
What is monocropping?
This substance cycles through the environment through living and non-living processes. It is the most fundamental ingredient in all living things, and is required for the production of proteins and new cells (cell wall and membrane)
What is carbon?
The process of excess precipitation traveling across a land's surface, due to reaching a land's maximum capacity for infiltration.
What is run off?
These 2 natural events occur with or without humans, though do occur more often as a result of human activities. Both activities cause a release of stored carbon to return to the atmosphere and are crucial in the carbon cycle.
What are volcanoes and wild fires?
Upon death, the nutrients from these 2 categories of organisms returns to the soil for decomposers and bacteria to break down.
What are producers? Consumers?
The process of breeding wild crops and animals over time. Over generations we select for traits that allow the animal or crop to produce a good that is used for human consumption.
What is domestication?
This substance cycles through the environment through living and non-living processes and is 1 of the 6 macronutrients needed for life. Specifically, this material is essential for the production of new DNA, RNA, and proteins.
What is nitrogen?
The process of land absorbing precipitation to form stores of groundwater.
What is infiltration?
These 2 terms refer to the removal of fossil fuels from the earth and the burning of fossil fuels to produce electricity. Both processes significantly disrupt the natural cycling of carbon and contribute to global warming.
What are extraction and combustion?
This industry has the biggest impact on the nitrogen cycle as it is the most responsible for excess fertilizer being deposited to major bodies of water.
What is agriculture?
This agricultural method refers to the process of growing multiple plants or crops in close proximity and often switching locations between seasons.
What is polycropping? What is intercropping?
This toxic substance forms when precipitation, specifically rainwater, mixes with plastic in landfills, poisoning ground water supplies and damaging soil.
What is leachate?
These specific acids are the cause of acid rain.
What are nitric and sulfuric acids?
These 2 living processes help to maintain the balance of carbon in our atmosphere, ocean, soil, and organisms.
1 process involves absorbing sunlight, CO2, and H2O to produce O2 and C6H12O6
The other process involves using C6H12O6 and O2 to produce CO2, H2O, and energy.
What are photosynthesis and cellular respiration?
This phenomenon occurs when excess nitrogen, typically from artificial fertilizers runs-off into major bodies of water, like rivers, lakes, and even the ocean and causes a major population boom of algae. As a result algae populations cover the surface of the water causing all organisms beneath to die from lack of sunlight, nutrients, and increased amounts of toxins.
What are algal blooms?
These 2 "revolutions" refers to significant changes in technology that allowed human population to significantly increase.
The first refers to the shift from hunting and gathering to farming.
The second refers to the shift from human and animal-only labor to using machines and factories.
These 3 gasses are the most common greenhouse caused from human pollution.
What are methane? Nitrous oxide? Carbon dioxide?