Word: phosphorus
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Marine scientists are only now beginning to understand the process by which coastal waters are affected by pollution. The problem, they say, may begin hundreds of miles from the ocean, where nutrients, such as nitrogen and phosphorus, as well as contaminants, enter rivers from a variety of sources. Eventually, these pollutants find their way into tidal waters. For the oceans, the first critical line of defense is that point in estuaries, wetlands and marshes where freshwater meets salt water. Marine biologists call this the zone of maximum turbidity -- literally, where the water becomes cloudy from mixing...
Residents of Miamisburg, Ohio, found last week that they couldn't go home again after all. Early in the week 15,000 of them were evacuated when 15 cars of a 44-car transport train derailed, causing a tanker filled with phosphorus to explode and spew a plume of noxious white smoke over the small city (pop. 18,000) ten miles southwest of Dayton. Local hospitals treated some 300 people for respiratory problems and eye irritations...
...cause of grass loss is an increase of sediment, which blocks the light that plants need in order to carry on photosynthesis. Another problem is the bay's excess of nitrogen and phosphorus. These nutrients "fertilize" the bay and promote the proliferation of algae. When algae decompose, they rob the water of its life-giving oxygen, killing the grasses and the creatures that depend on them. There are areas of the bay-submarine deserts-where nothing at all can live...
Most of the phosphorus, biologists have found, comes from factories and municipal sewage-treatment plants. The nitrogen apparently enters the Chesapeake from farm fields and construction sites, which send fertilizers and soil into rivers and, ultimately, into the bay. Most of this nitrogen comes into the Chesapeake from the Susquehanna River. Flowing across Pennsylvania's rich farm country, the Susquehanna provides the bay with more than 40% of its fresh water and up to three-quarters of its nutrients...
...officers, all of them white, were accused of abetting saboteurs from neighboring South Africa who destroyed or damaged about 25% of Zimbabwe's combat aircraft with phosphorus grenades in a midnight raid a year ago on Thornhill air force base in the Zimbabwe midlands. They were brought to court in May and faced maximum penalties of death or life imprisonment...