PH level

Zach Smith

Dr. Fortner

September 28, 2012

Blog 3

            Water quality relates to geology/nature and humans in many different ways. First we need to understand what water quality is, water quality is “an assessment of the physical, chemical and biological characteristics of water, especially how they relate to the suitability of that water for a particular use.” Geologists are interested in water quality, because of its relation to nature within the critical zone, which has different levels of effects on humans in the society we live in today. Water quality has a number of issues, and can be related to geology because geologists have been sampling water for years, collecting millions of samples testing the changes in the water in the different level of measurments which are, the levels of the PH, conductivity, temperature, dissolved oxygen, nitrate or othro-phosphate. When these begin to change from the results of the measurements taken from samples, than one can begin to infer that that something is going on somewhere in the water that is affecting the water, which hurts the water quality, having negative consequences for humans, due to the dependency we have to water as humans.

I graphed the PH level over the year. According to http://www.phperformancewater.com/?page_id=65 PH is “the acidity or alkalinity of a solution.  A low pH indicates acidic conditions and a high pH indicates basic conditions.  pH is actually a measure of the amount of hydrogen ions in solution.  In fact, some people think of it as being the “power of hydrogen.”  A low pH has a large number of free hydrogen ions in the water, whereas a high pH has relatively few.  Technically, pH is the negative logarithm of the free hydrogen activity in a solution.” PH is very important to the water quality. The website goes on to say that “pH is highly important and is used to monitor for safe water conditions.  Many animals cannot live in a pH level below 5 or above 9.  Once the normal pH range for water has been established, a rise or fall in pH can indicate chemical pollution, or acid rain.” PH needs to be monitored on a regular basis so that we know if our water is becoming polluted or not and if it is safe to drink or be in/around.