15.澳大利亚盐化补充一点背景文章,转自一位CDer. So where does the salt come from?
The sources of salt involved in dryland salinity are: rainfall (cyclic salt), rock weathering, aeolian deposits and ancient seas (connate salts).
Cyclic salts
Cyclic salts are those salts which are included in water evaporated from oceans and deposited over coastal areas. Rainwater generally contains 10 to 30mg/l of salts. Studies have shown that in Australia the rainfall input of salts is as great as 300kg/ha/yr near the coast, about 30kg/ha/yr 250km inland and about 15kg/ha/yr more than 600km inland.
Salts from rainfall only become a problem when there is not enough precipitation to flush the deposited salts from the soil profile via leaching. The salts will accumulate and if they are subsequently released then they will become an environmental issue.
Connate salts Connate salt is salt incorporated in marine sediments at the time of deposition. The sediments were deposited by inland seas millions of years ago that naturally contained large quantities of salts. For example, the Wiannamatta Shale Group of the Sydney Basin were deposited by a retreating ocean (marine regression) during the Tertiary. These shales contain salt from seawater trapped during the time of deposition. These shales provide the salts responsible for salinity outbreaks in Western Sydney.
Continued weathering of rocks will release salts. This is generally not a source for large quantities of salt because large amounts of water are required for weathering reactions to occur. This means that if there is a continual flux of water salts will be flushed through the system rather than accumulating.
The Australian continent is geologically very old and so has had a long time for salts to naturally accumulate in the landscape. During this time the landscape has been affected by climatic oscillations (change) between glacial and interglacial conditions. During periods of aridity, winds were capable of blowing salt laden dust from western New South Wales to the east. One such period was the Pleistocene, when the climate was significantly more arid than today and strong easterly winds carried significant quantities of this salt laden Aeolian dust from the Murray Darling Basin and deposited it on the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales. It is the mobilisation of these salts incorporated in debris flows that is today the major source of salt for the dryland salinity occurrences on the Southern Tablelands. |