Portal:Environment

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The Environment Portal

Devil's Punchbowl Waterfall, New Zealand.
The natural environment comprises all naturally-occurring surroundings and conditions in which living things grow and interact on Earth. These include complete landscape units that function as natural systems without major human intervention, as well as plants, animals, rocks, and natural phenomena occurring within their boundaries. They also include non-local or universal natural resources that lack clear-cut boundaries, such as air, water and climate.

As human populations grow and evolve, their activity modifies the natural environment at a rapidly increasing rate, producing what is referred to as the built environment. The potential of the natural environment to sustain these anthropogenic changes while continuing to function as an ecosystem is an issue of major worldwide concern. Key environmental areas of interest include climate change, water supply and waste water, air pollution, waste management and hazardous waste, and land use issues such as deforestation, desertification, and urban sprawl.

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An average of several samples of δ18O, a proxy for temperature, for the last 600,000 years
100,000-year problem is a discrepancy between the climate response (as measured by proxies for the temperature and extent of glaciations) and the forcing from the amount of incoming solar radiation, or insolation, which has little power on a 100,000 year (100 ka) timescale.

Due to variations in the Earth's orbit, the amount of insolation varies with periods of around 21,000, 40,000, 100,000 and 400,000 years. This is recognised as a key factor in the initiation and termination of ice ages.

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Atomic bombing of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945.
Credit: United States military

The detonation of nuclear weapons leads to the release of radioactive material into the environment. This radioactive material affects human health and the natural environment.

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Theodore Roosevelt
To waste, to destroy our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase its usefulness, will result in undermining in the days of our children the very prosperity which we ought by right to hand down to them amplified and developed.
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