How much do you know about water pollution?

Understanding Water and Water Pollution

• Water is essential for life on Earth.
• Water originally formed on Earth through the cooling of rocks, releasing a lot of water.
• Surface water is freshwater on Earth's land surface, while groundwater is water stored beneath Earth's surface in sediment and rock formations. An aquifer is an underground layer of rock that has groundwater flowing through it. Water pollution is the introduction of chemical, physical, or biological agents into water that degrade water quality and adversely affect the organisms that depend on it.
• 70% of Earth is water, with 97% of all Earth's water being salt water and 3% being fresh water. Of Earth's water, 77% is locked up in glaciers, leaving only 0.7% of fresh and usable water.
• Salt water cannot be consumed by humans because it dehydrates us and can make us very sick. The two main sources of freshwater for human use are groundwater and surface water.
• Water is used for personal use in various ways, including bathing, watering crops, garden, lawn, brushing teeth, cooking, and drinking.
• Point source pollution refers to one identifiable source, while non-point source pollution is hard to identify with many different sources. Examples of point source pollution include cleaning, flushing toilets, and pools, while non-point source pollution examples include chemicals added to roads, runoff from city and suburban streets, pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers, feces and chemicals from livestock, acid rain, soil runoff from farms/construction sites, and oil and gas from personal machines.
• Sewage water treatment from septic tanks involves the sewage entering the system through the inlet pipe, bacteria breaking down waste, denser wastes that break down slowly sinking to the bottom (sludge), less dense waste building up at the top of the tank (scum), and water traveling to a gravel field through the outlet pipe.
• Tap and bottled water have different regulations, price and transportation differences, and essential nutrients (tap has fluoride to prevent tooth decay).
• Causes of water pollution include sewage and wastewater, industrial waste, oil pollution, atmospheric deposition, marine dumping, radioactive waste, underground storage leakages, global warming, and eutrophication.
• Microbiological water pollution is caused by microorganisms (bacteria, viruses, protozoa), and the disease caused by this type of pollution is Cholera. This issue is normally found in poorer countries with no facility to treat water.
• Nutrients that cause nutrient water pollution are found in wastewater and fertilizers, leading to excess weeds and algae growth. The three types of chemical water pollution are metals and solvents, pesticides, and petroleum.