Acid rain is a serious problem with disastrous effects. Each day this serious problem increases, many people believe that this issue is too small to deal with right now this issue should be met head on and solved before it is too late. In the following paragraphs I will be discussing the impact has on the wildlife and how our atmosphere is being destroyed by acid rain. Acid rain is a cancer eating into the face of Eastern Canada and the North Eastern United States. In Canada, the main sulphuric acid sources are nonferrous smelters and power generation.
On both sides of the border, cars and trucks are the main sources for nitric acid(about 40% of the total), while power generating plants and industrial commercial and residential fuel combustion together contribute most of the rest. In the air, the sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides can be transformed into sulphuric acid and nitric acid, and air current can send them thousands of kilometres from the source. When the acids fall to the earth in any form it will have large impact on the growth or the preservation of certain wildlife.
Areas in Ontario mainly southern regions that are near the Great Lakes, such substances as limestone or other known antacids can neutralize acids entering the body of water thereby protecting it. However, large areas of Ontario that are near the PreCambrian Shield, with quartzite or granite based geology and little top soil, there is not enough buffering capacity to neutralize even small amounts of acid falling on the soil and the lakes. Therefore over time, the basic environment shifts from an alkaline to a acidic one.
This is why many lakes in the Muskoka, Haliburton, Algonquin, Parry Sound and Manitoulin districts could lose their fisheries if sulphur emissions are not reduced substantially. The average mean of pH rainfall in Ontario’s MuskokaHaliburton lake country ranges between 3. 95 and 4. 38 about 40 times more acidic than normal rainfall, while storms in Pennsilvania have rainfall pH at 2. 8 it almost has the same rating for vinegar. Already 140 Ontario lakes are completely dead or dying.
An additional 48 000 are sensitive and vulnerable to acid rain due to the surrounding concentrated acidic soils. Canada does not have as many people, power plants or automobiles as the United States, and yet acid rain there has become so severe that Canadian government officials called it the most pressing environmental issue facing the nation. But it is important to bear in mind that acid rain is only one segment, of the widespread pollution of the atmosphere facing the world.
Each year the global atmosphere is on the receiving end of 20 billion tons of carbon dioxide, 130 million tons of suffer dioxide, 97 million tons of hydrocarbons, 53 million tons of nitrogen oxides, more than three million tons of arsenic, cadmium, lead, mercury, nickel, zinc and other toxic metals, and a host of synthetic organic compounds ranging from polychlorinated biphenyls(PCBs) to toxaphene and other pesticides, a number of which may be capable of causing cancer, birth defects, or genetic imbalances.
