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APES First Quarter
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Rachel Carson | Author of <i>Silent Spring</i> |
| Pesticide | Any chemical designed to kill or inhibit the growth of an organism that people consider undesirable |
| Biomagnification | Increase in concentration of DDT, PCBs, and other slowly degradable, fat-soluble chemicals in organisms at successively higher trophic levels of a food chain/web |
| Environmental science | Interdisciplinary study that uses info and ideas from physical sciences with those from the social sciences and humanities to learn how nature works, how we interact with the environment, and how we can to help deal with environmental problems |
| Ecology | Biological science that studies the relationships between living organisms and their environment; study of the structure functions of nature |
| Sustainability | Ability of earth's various systems, including human cultural and economies, to survive and adapt to changing environmental conditions indefinitely |
| Ecological footprint | Amount of biologically productive land/water needed to supply a population with the renewable resources it uses and absorb or dispose if the wastes from such resource use. It is a measure of the AVG environmental impact of populations in different areas. |
| Natural resources | Materials such as air, water, soil and energy in nature that are essential or useful to humans |
| Renewable resources | Resources that can be replenished rapidly (hours to several decades) through natural processes as long as it is not used up faster than it is replaced |
| Nonrenewable resources | Resources that exists in a fixed amount (Stock) in the earth's crust and has the potential for renewal by geological, physical, and chemical processes taking place over hundreds of millions to billions of years |
| 5 Basic Causes of Environmental Problems | Population growth Unsustainable Resource use Poverty Excluding environmental costs from market prices Trying to manage nature without knowing enough about it |
| Scientific method | The ways scientists gather data and formulate and test scientific hypotheses, models, theories, and laws |
| Hypothesis (Null Hypothesis) | Educated guess |
| Independent variable | The changing variable |
| Dependent variable | The variable that remains constant |
| Controlled experiment | Only one variable is changed between different test subjects to identify differences. |
| Correlation | Mutual relationship between 2+ things |
| Agricultural revolution | Gradual shift from small, mobile hunting and gathering bands to settle agricultural communities in which people survived by breeding and raising wild animals and cultivating wild plants near where they lived. Began 10,000-12,000 years ago. |
| Industrial revolution | The transformation from an agricultural to an industrial nation |
| Green revolution | Popular term for the the introduction of scientifically bred or selected varieties of grain (rice, wheat, maize) that, with adequate inputs of fertilizer and water, can greatly increase crop yields |
| Information revolution | Use of new technologies to enable people to have increasingly rapid access to much more information on a global scale |
| Tragedy of the Commons | depletion or degradation of a potentially renewable resource to which people gave free and ill-managed access |
| Conservation | Sensible and careful use of natural use of natural resources by humans |
| Preservation | The action of preserving something |
| Environmental movement | The gathered effort of those who are concerned about the human impact on the environment |
| Gaia hypothesis | the theory, put forward by James Lovelock, that living matter on the earth collectively defines and regulates the material conditions necessary for the continuance of life. The planet is thus likened to a vast self-regulating organism. |
| Spaceship Earth | View of the the earth as a spaceship: a machine that we can understand, control, and change at will by using advanced technology |
| Tribal era | A large amount of people in the Americas had low-impact life on the environment This era began in the early 1600's |
| Frontier era | This era included the American colonization |
| Executive branch | President and staff |
| Legislative branch | Congress |
| Judicial branch | Courts |
| Aldo Leopold | Forester, writer, and conservationist |
| John Muir | Geologist, naturalist, and explorer Spent 6 yrs studying Yosemite (founded it in 1890) and explored the wilderness of UT, NV,the Northwest, and AK Founded the Sierra Club Spent 22 yrs lobbying for conservation laws |
| Theodore Roosevelt | 26th president Ardent conservationist |
| Gifford Pinchot | The first chief of the US Forestry Service |
| EPA | Environmental Protection Agency Protagonist of <i>The Simpsons Movie</i> |
| NEPA | National Environmental Policy Act |
| Clean Air Act | A law putting the foot down on air pollution, first in the UK in 1956 |
| Clean Water Act | A failed attempt to meet EPA's standard of safe drinking water |
| Endangered Species Act | In 1973, the US passed this law to protect endangered species |
| Safe Drinking Water Act | The law that set the standard on how safe drinking water should be (Set by the EPA) |
| EIS | Environmental Impact Statement |
| National Energy Act | This law encourages conservation |
| Superfund law | Law to identify sites that have been contaminated by hazardous wastes and clean them up on a priority basis |
| IPCC | Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change |
| A Horizon | Topsoil Contains inorganic material like silt, clay, and sand |
| B Horizon | Subsoil |
| C Horizon | Parent Material Bedrock |
| O Horizon | Leaf litter |
| R Horizon | Granite, basalt, quartzite, etc |
| Topsoil | A Horizon Teems with bacteria, fungi, earthworms, and small insects |
| Parent Material | C Horizon |
| Salinization | Accumulation of salts in soil that can eventually make the soil unable to support plant growth |
| Desertification | Conversion of rangeland, rain-fed cropland, or irrigated cropland to desert-like land, with a drop in agricultural productivity of 10% or more. It usually is caused by a combination of overgrazing, soil erosion, prolonged drought, and climate change. |
| Troposphere | Innermost layer of the atmosphere It contains about 75% of earth's air mass and extends about 17 km above sea level |
| Stratosphere | Second layer of the atmosphere Extends about 17-48 km above sea level Small amounts of gaseous ozone |
| Mesosphere | 50-80 km above sea level This is where meteors burn up |
| Thermosphere | Outermost shell of the atmosphere |
| Exosphere | Outermost region of the atmosphere |
| Ozone Layer | Layer of gaseous ozone in the stratosphere that protects life on earth by filtering out most harmful UV radiation from the sun |
| Runoff | Freshwater from precipitation and melting ice that flows on the earth's surface into nearby streams, lakes, wetlands, and reservoirs |
| Watershed | Land area that delivers water, sediment and dissolved substances via small streams to a major stream (river) |
| Point vs Nonpoint Pollution | (Point)Single identifiable source that causes pollution (Nonpoint)broad and diffuse areas, rather than points, from which pollutants enter bodies of surface water or air |
| Pangaea | The super continent that was once all the continents combined before they drifted apart |
| Geosphere | Earth's intensely hot core, thick mantle composed mostly of rock, and thin outer crust that contains most of the earth's rock, soil, and sediment |
| Uniformitarian Principle | |
| Plate Tectonics | Theory of geophysical processes that explains the movements of lithospheric plates and the processes that occur at their boundaries |
| Rock cycle | Largest and slowest of the earth's cycles, consisting of geologic, physical, and chemical processes that form and modify rocks and soil in the earth's crust over millions of years |
| Transform fault | Area where the earth's lithospheric plates move in opposite but parallel directions along a fracture (fault) in the lithosphere |
| Divergent boundary | Area where the the earth's lithospheric plates move apart in opposite directions |
| Convergent boundary | Area where the earth's plates are pushed together |
| Earthquakes | Shaking of the ground resulting from the fracturing and displacement of rock, which produces a fault, or from subsequent movement along the fault |
| Erosion | Process or group of processes by which loose or consolidated earth materials are dissolved, loosened, or worn away and removed from one place and deposited in another |
| Weathering | Physical and chemical processes in which solid rock exposed at earth's surface is changed to separate solid particles and dissolved material, which can then be moved to another place as sediment |
| Volcanoes | vent or fissure in the earth's surface through which magma, liquid lava, and gases are released into the atmosphere |
| First Law of Thermodynamics | Energy is created or destroyed, but energy can be changed from one form to another; you cannot get more energy out of something than you put in; in terms of energy quantity, you cannot get something from nothing Doesn't apply to nuclear change |
| Second Law of Thermodynamics | In any conversion of heat energy to useful work, some of the initial energy is always degraded to ;lower-quality, more dispersed, less useful energy--usually low-temp heat that flows into the the environment |
| Solar Intensity and latitude | The amount of solar activity a certain area of latitude gets depends on the time of year |
| Hydrological cycle | The water cycle: Evaporation Condensation Precipitation Repeat |
| Convection cells | Also called currents They move large volumes of rock and heat in loops within the mantle like gigantic conveyor belts |
| Prevailing winds | Differing directions of air movement |
| Tornadoes | Swirling funnel-shaped clouds that form of land that can cause serious damage |
| Tsunamis | Series of large waves generated when part of the ocean floor suddenly rises or drops |
| Rain shadow | Low precipitation on the leeward side of a mountain when prevailing winds flow up and over a high mountain or range of high mountains, creating semiarid and arid conditions on the leeward side of a high mountain range |
| Atmosphere | Whole mass of air surrounding the earth |
| Climate vs. Weather | The difference is length of time Weather is temporary is changing constantly Climate is more permanent |
| Coriolis Effect | The observed effect of the Coriolis force, especially the deflection of an object moving above the earth, rightward in the northern hemisphere and leftward in the southern hemisphere. |
| ENSO | El Nino-Southern Oscillation A shift in trade winds |
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