Acid Rain's Dirty Business: Stealing Minerals From Soil

摘要

As ecological crises go, the damage done by acid rain had seemed pretty easy to fix. Just cut emissions of sulfur from power plants, and trees would again flourish and acidic waters return to their natural pH. But even though the United States, Canada, and European countries have cut sulfur pollution, forests, lakes, and streams haven't bounced buck as quickly as expected. The reason, scientists have suspected, is that acid rain has wrought profound changes in the soil, to which all these ecosystemsare linked. Now, after looking over 30 years of data from a New Hampshire forest, researchers may have confirmed this hunch.