The term ‘acid rain’ seems to be everywhere when discussing environmental issues, but what exactly is it?
According to the official United States EPA website, acid rain refers to “a mixture of wet and dry deposition…from the atmosphere containing higher than normal amounts of of nitric and sulfuric acids.” Wet deposition refers to literal rain or other forms of precipitation in which the water carries these chemicals up and through the air via the natural weather patterns of an are. Dry deposition, on the other hand, refers to these pollutants in the form of dust or other non-water related mediums. As, according to this same website, about half of the earth’s acid rain is carried in this form, one might say that the term in itself is a misnomer. The diagram below highlights the two main pollutant, xxx, and their main sources:
Acid Rain (Pearson)
Below is a Creative Commons-licensed photograph from Flickr of trees damaged by acid rain. In this instance, the area affected by this precipitation is in Tennessee. Even though this blog covers the EANET and its efforts to control the acid rain problem in Eastern Asia, it is important to remember that this is a global, not a localized, problem.
