Abstract

Time is running out to reverse our collective impact on climate change. Core samples retrieved from the Dead Sea, per the Dead Sea Deep Drilling Project, granted researchers access to 220,000 years of sedimentary records. Strikingly, the samples revealed unprecedented results: fine sediment accumulated three to four times greater in the area during seasonal floods some 11,500 years ago, concurring with the earliest human civilization in the region. As such, the data suggests that erosion was facilitated by the removal of natural vegetation, its replacement by crops, deforestation practices, and grazing herds. While some might argue that this was the inevitable consequence of the seasonal nature of flooding in the area and the aforementioned civilization’s only means of survival at the time. Based on “The Earliest Evidence of Human Impact on Earth’s Geology Has Been Found in The Dead Sea,” Shmuel Marco, from Tel Aviv University in Israel, notes that “This intensified erosion is incompatible with tectonic and climatic regimes during the Holocene – the geological epoch that began after the Pleistocene some 11,700 years ago” (BEC Crew 2017). Similarly, Cornell University’s “Soil Erosion Threatens Environment and Human Health, Study Reports,” “Around the world, soil is being swept and washed away 10 to 40 times faster than it is being replenished, destroying cropland the size of Indiana every year” (Cornell University 2006). As such, the severity of soil erosion is the second leading cause of environmental degradation, second only to population growth. 

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Soil erosion is defined simply as the wearing away of topsoil, the most organic and nutrient-rich layer of soil. It is a serious concern, for displacing topsoil severs the land’s ability to sequester greenhouse gases that would otherwise not be released into the atmosphere as rapidly as they are now if they were not exacerbated by human practices and the ongoing global climate crisis. For example, machines used in agricultural practices are among the major reasons for the large-scale displacement of topsoil, not to mention such machines’ collective contribution to the augmentation of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Furthermore, with the onset of the drought of 1931, the death of crops en masse exposed barren, over-plowed farmland. As an unfortunate result, the effects of the deficit of prairie plants that once held the soil in place, paired with drought and gusty winds, led to a series of major dust storms that birthed the Southern Plains’ alternate alias—the Dust Bowl.

With the adoption of a sedentary lifestyle at the onset of the Neolithic Era, climate change became a matter of when complex, agriculturally dependent societies would be too much for the planet to sustain. This is because the transition from hunting and gathering to cultivating crops spurred not only the alteration/reduction of wildlife habitats, but it also—with the advancement of technology and subsequent advancements in agricultural practices—led to the introduction of toxic chemicals, nutrients, and pathogens into the soil. As such, human agriculture not only reduced wildlife biodiversity via its dependence on machines, its introduction of chemicals to the environment, and its replacement of entire forests for the cultivation of select crop species, it also promoted the erosion of soil, which ultimately served as a positive feedback loop for climate change.

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