Global Population and the Nitrogen Cycle
By: Vaclav Smil
http://ogoapes.weebly.com/uploads/3/2/3/9/3239894/global_population_and_the_nitrogen_cycle.pdf
http://ogoapes.weebly.com/uploads/3/2/3/9/3239894/global_population_and_the_nitrogen_cycle.pdf
- Only very few portions of the nitrogen in the world exists in forms that plants, animals, and human beings can use
- Nitrogen is crucially important for DNA and RNA, the molecules that store and transfer genetic information
- It is required to make proteins, messengers, receptors, catalysts and structural components of all plant and animal cells
- Human society has one key chemical industry for all the agricultural that happened which is the producers of Nitrogen Fertilizers
- Most important nitrogen-fixing bacteria are called the genus Rhizobium, symbionts that create nodules on the roots of leguminous plants like beans or acacia trees
- The nitrogen-fixing bacteria living in the roots of the plants help enrich the fields with nitrogen
- During the 19th century, scientists began to understand the role of nitrogen in food production and its scarcity in of its usable form
- Two other key nutrients were potassium and phosphorus and unlike them, nitrogen is extremely difficult to obtain
- The invention of Ammonia Synthesis turned things around in which synthesizes ammonia from hydrogen and nitrogen originally created by Carl Bosch but the process was made out by Fritz Haber
- 175 million tons of nitrogen flowing over croplands and half are put in cultivated plants
- Massive introduction of reactive nitrogen into soils and waters has many deleterious consequences for the environment
- Fertilizer nitrogen that escapes to ponds, lakes or ocean bays causes eutrophication, the enrichment of waters by a previous scarce nutrient
- Increased usage of nitrogen fertilizers also produces more concentrations of nitrous oxide
- Nitrous oxide mixing in with oxygen creates a devastating effect on excessive greenhouse warming and leading to destructions of ozone in the stratosphere
Nitrogen is an essential element to all living organisms of those including plants and animals to be able to survive. However, most of it is unreactive and not accessible for us to use. We need the nitrogen to be in a "fixed" form, where it is reactive. Its important for the food production process. Since then, Haber and Bosch found the discovery on an industrial-based process in which helped us to maintain the food production for its growing population but had a negative side-effect that put risky costs for the environment and to the public health of humans itself. Some of these are stratospheric ozone depletion, increased greenhouse gases, smog, acid rain, etc.
I think that nitrogen is highly beneficial in many ways that both humans and nature depend on. The drawbacks of not having nitrogen is us going into ruins. Without nitrogen, we wouldn't be able to repair ourselves or form new tissues, have increased risk of birth defects, plants can't go through photosynthesis and will fail to support the food chain, respiratory problems, and so on. The main reason why we overlook nitrogen in the wrong way is because we only focus on the agricultural sector and not finding efficient ways to fertilize our crop without damaging the things around us. The only thing that is keeping us on the right track is using ammonia to produce fertilizer but I feel that we need to do more better than that and we got to find that soon.