Rising Tide Of Salinity Already Affects 5 Million Acres In Australia

[hatrack]

DICKS CREEK, Australia - Farmer John Ive squints through the barbed wire fence separating the roadside from an ulcerous patch of ground where salt has risen from the earth to collapse the land into crumbling, barren ravines. Black stumps from an earlier fence, decayed from the bottom up by salt, dance from wire strands in the biting wind. "These sites are pockmarked across the southern tablelands," says Ive, shaking his head in despair at desertification of Australia's farmlands as underground salt rises to the surface.

Only the Sahara has more desert than Australia, whose red centre has long been thought uninhabitable by modern man. But while Australia's central deserts are now seen as benign and are starting to yield fruit, salination is turning once productive farmland into lifeless dirt tracts and threatening the country's A$30 billion (US$22 billion) agriculture export industry, one of the biggest in the world.

Around 2 million hectares (5 million acres) of land is now officially salt-affected, half of that in southwest Western Australia.

The amount of saline land could rise to 6 million hectares (15 million acres) in 50 years, but that would be the upper limit, says Kevin Goss, chief executive officer for the Cooperative Research Centre for Plant-based Management of Dryland Salinity. Farmers are terrified of the salt, which cuts land values by one-third and reduces output.

EDIT

http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/37246/story.htm

[Massacure]

1. How long does salt effect the environment for?

[TheMadMonk]

2. Until it's removed.

[Dead_Parrot]

3. You work in management or consultancy, for a guess.

:evilgrin: