Fertilizers affect the environment?
By: Danny and Randy
nitrogen in general
Nitrogen is found all over the planet, not just in the sky. It is in living things, air, and water. Nitrogen travels from living and non-living parts of our planet during a process called the nitrogen cycle, which is one of the Earth’s biogeochemical cycles.
How sewage affects the environment.
Dumping of raw sewage contains nitrogenous wastes, along with urban runoff. When large amounts of nitrogen collect in a water body, eutrophication can result. This is an accumulation of excess nutrients which causes an algae bloom. The algae rapidly deplete all of the oxygen in the water, making it inhospitable for fish and other aquatic organisms. Eutrophication also brings about the deadly red tides. When plant communities are saturated with nitrogen, the soil can become acidified.
Who found nitrogen in fertilizer
In the middle of the 1800's, Justis von Liebig (1803 - 1873) analyzed plant material for its chemical components. He found that while there were many different substances present, phosphorus, potassium, and in particular nitrogen were mainly responsible for the growth of plants. These three – N, P and K – are the numbers you see when you read the label on a bag of fertilizer, and indicate the percentage by mass of the element in the fertilizer.
How fertilizer affects the cycle
When an extreme amount of nitrogen such as, nitrogen rich fertilizer enters a body of waterit creats alge which then takes the oxygen out of the water wich then kills the fish wich messes up the whole nitrogen cycle