Our Human Impact
- Ben
- Oct 15, 2015
- 1 min read
The human impact we chose to incorporate into our biome was acid rain. To simulate the acid rain, we mixed water with vinegar and lemon juice until the pH was 4.45. After the “acid” rain was made we sprayed it into our biome.
The next day that we checked the terrarium we found that that only a couple of our leaves have died. Our problem could have been because we spray the leaves of the fern and not much of the ground for the acid to go to. We wanted to imitate real life conditions, where the acid rain would affect the leaves, but also soak into the ground and cause long lasting damages by impacting the roots. But, we did notice that the moss had died a bit from the acid rain.
Acid rain depletes calcium, so we decided to counter act our acid rain by adding calcium, this process is called liming. One way to add calcium would be to add limestone. To simulate this process we took chalk and mashed up and put it into some water. We then sprayed the chalk water mix into the terrarium.
After we came back from the weekend, we found that the plants in the terrarium were mostly dead and dried up. As a way to fix that we tried to water the plants. We also added more of the chalk water and a little acid rain. After leaving it overnight it hadn't improved that much. For the most part the plants had died from dehydration, then from the acid rain.
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