On a frigid,
snowy day, nothing tastes (or smells!) quite as good as warm, chicken noodle
soup. The first thing I usually notice is the soup tastes delicious, but needs
a little extra flavor. My solution: salt! We use salt on our foods to enhance and
balance the flavors in our meal. But at a certain point, one too many grinds of
the saltshaker can make flavor overwhelmingly salty. Something similar is
happening to our sources of drinking water worldwide.
Picture
the same cold day, but now think of the roads, sidewalks, and parking lots. We
use deicing agents, primarily road salt, as a method to stay safe in inclement
weather conditions. Yearly, Maryland buys 230,000 tons of road salt each year,
or about 30,000 dump trucks to prevent accidents. The US uses about 10 to 20
million tons of salt each year! I agree it is important for us to use a deicing
agent for safety, but where does the road salt goes when the snow and ice melts?
The salt dissolves and is transported with the melted snow and ice into
groundwater and the nearby streams. Throughout the winter, the streams are
getting saltier just like the flavor when we add more salt to soup. The term
Freshwater Salinization Syndrome describes the process of increasing
salinization over time. Salinization does not only impact areas that use road salt
but occurs globally in most of our major rivers. Building and road materials,
construction, fertilizers, water softeners, and even our sewage are causing our
freshwater sources to get saltier.
 |
| Road salt on walkway in College Park, Maryland. |
During
the winter months, the salinities in rivers in Maryland, New Hampshire, and New
York are 25-40% the saltiness of seawater during the winter. Our rivers have
the salinity of about 1.5 to 2 cans of Campbell’s Condensed Chicken Noodle Soup!
The salinity values remain elevated during the summer months as well. The consistently
saltier environment drastically alters the natural chemical balance of the
freshwater and creates an inhospitable home to many aquatic organisms. Highly
sensitive and native organisms such as fish, plants, and macroinvertebrates are
unable to survive in these conditions, altering the food web of the stream. The
influx of salt not only harms the aquatic life but also causes the release of
toxic metals into the rivers. When ingested in very high doses, these metals
can cause a variety of human health effects, such as skin, skeletal, and
nervous system disorders.
Over the years, the specific conductance (a way to measure salinity) has increased at many locations throughout the United States. Notice the red line increasing! (Source: Kaushal et al., 2018)
Freshwater
Salinization Syndrome is an increasingly pertinent problem in freshwater sources
worldwide. To reduce the impacts of salinization, we must continue research to
find methods to properly and holistically manage road salt and other sources of
salt to our freshwater environments.
Sources:
https://www.baltimoresun.com/bal-te.journal18feb18-column.html
https://mde.state.md.us/programs/Marylander/Documents/2013_Stranko_Road_Salt_(final)_TMF_edits.pdf
https://www.campbells.com/products/condensed/chicken-noodle-soup/
This makes me hungry! It is a good start on your blog, and the language is mostly accessible. I think your audience will be left asking where did the metals come from, and why does increasing salinity release them. This is an important point to make the story holistic, so let's explore how to explain that part to a general audience. Also, specific conductance will be difficult, so perhaps modify the graph so that this term does not appear, or explain what is being conducted and why this increases with salt?
ReplyDeleteGood job! (And here omit other words for praising, just because I'm lazy.) As I mentioned in the class, you can find a single panel figure with only one fitting line to substitute the last figure. This substitution might reduce the difficulty for readers to understand the figure. Jay suggested a multiple fitting line plot for several rivers without origin dot data. It sounds like a good idea. (However, you may need to find data and custom the plot by yourself.) Alex recommended that you can add information about how to relieve the freshwater salinization syndrome because readers might feel stressed after reading this Blog. If you are to do so, I think pushing more stress, especially those can precisely hit the individuals, would be helpful for catching the readers and also enhancing the connection between last two paragraph. For example, in the penultimate paragraph, after mentioning food chain and toxic metals, you can mention the biomagnification and say "you may have just eaten a fish that is thousands times enriched in toxins". However, it will introduce a new jargon and distract readers from the fresh water syndrome. I believe you can make good choices.
ReplyDeleteAs someone who has never experienced snow before moving to Maryland, this introduced me to a bunch of new, interesting info! I just have a couple of suggestions. First, I would include a sentence defining the term salinization. I'm sure that the readers would be able to infer what it meant, but it wouldn't hurt to include a definition for clarity's sake. And as others have mentioned, I also think it would help to end on a high note - maybe by mentioning some examples of research that's currently being done now in an effort to mitigate this?
ReplyDeleteHi Carly! I really enjoyed reading your blog, I think you did a great job making it accessible to a general audience. I also liked your soup can analogy and like we talked about in class, how you quantified the amount of salt by number of dump trucks. I only have one suggestion that is kind of the opposite of Emily's- I think really emphasizing the environmental concerns and health effects can help make a general audience understand WHY your research is so important. And then maybe leaving your audience with the thought of "Wow, this REALLY is an issue".
ReplyDeleteHi Carly! I don't think about fish a lot, so thank you for this new perspective. Like I said in class, the metals from salt is likely hard for the general audience to wrap their heads around in a single sentence. And as others have mentioned, I think it'd be great to replace pure numbers or percentages with "x times larger". Good job!
ReplyDeleteI really liked the logical flow of your post, going from the nice soup analogy, to introducing the concept, to backing it up with the evidence and really showing the reader why they should care. A comment I have is that I think your phrasing makes it sound like the salinities are high only in rivers in the three states you mention, MD, NH, and NY. Did those come from a specific study? Maybe rephrase it to make it clear that those are just examples and salinity is a problem everywhere.
ReplyDeleteHi Carly! Great job! I found your blog very interesting. I didn't know anything about the consequences of salt after every winter. As I said in class maybe you can use a picture at the beginning of the blog, memes are always funny and you can catch the attention of the reader and also make him laugh :)
ReplyDelete