WATER QUALITY AND CONTAMINATION - Lab Report Example

Therefore, the relevance of conducting experiments in order to find out what substances contaminate water and how the contamination takes place, is understood. In the light of the experiments, I was very surprised to find that detergent contaminated the water. I thought that the detergent would stay in the soil but it ended up seeping through the soil into the water. One of the main resources on earth is water and every biotic thing on this earth needs water to survive. Water is found below the surface, which means that the water can be easily contaminated.

Many substances such as laundry detergent, soap, fertilizers and pesticides are dumped on the ground daily, and these get abosrobed by the soil, thereby contaminating fresh ground water. As these contaminants pass through different layers of soil, there solubility as well as the degradation caused can vary. Various experiments have been conducted in order to understand how ground water is affected and one such study was done by Muñoz-Olivas et al. This experiment found that research efforts were crucial in dealing with the “remediation of leaching waters polluted” and to “prevent further damage of susrface and ground water reserves” (Muñoz-Olivas, Bouaid, Liva, Fernández-Hernando, Tadeo, & Cámara, 2007).

Similarly, the experiments conducted by Łuczkiewicz aim to explore the contamination of grounwater as a result of “sewae lsudge land application” (2005, p. 869). The study found that the various chemical substances that leached through the soil such as “nitrate and ammonium” and other metals that had their orgin in sewage sludge can reach underground “deeper than 0.8 m,” thus contaminating “shallow aquifers” (p. 869). The experiments conducted by Lee et al used column and pilot scale experiments to reveal that heavy metals from abandoned mines also contaminated groundwater.

However, by using “lime as a coagulant,” the researechers were able to remove “98%” of