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Salting the earth, or sowing with salt, is the ritual of spreading salt on the sites of cities razed by conquerors. [1] [2] It originated as a curse on re-inhabitation in the ancient Near East and became a well-established folkloric motif in the Middle Ages. [3] The best-known example is the salting of Shechem as narrated in the Biblical Book ...
An ancient practice in time of war was salting the earth: scattering salt around in a defeated city to prevent plant growth. The Bible tells the story of King Abimelech who was ordered by God to do this at Shechem , [ 18 ] and various texts claim that the Roman general Scipio Aemilianus Africanus ploughed over and sowed the city of Carthage ...
I understand that a detailed discussion on the effectiveness of salting the earth to prevent crop growth belongs in a separate article on soil salinity, but there's a difference between saying "they're different issues deserving separate articles" and taking the stance that they are completely unrelated and irrelevant to each other, which ...
where Ci is the salt concentration of the irrigation water, Cc is the salt concentration of the capillary rise, equal to the salt concentration of the upper part of the groundwater body, Fc is the fraction of the total evaporation transpired by plants, Ce is the salt concentration of the water taken up by the plant roots, Cp is the salt ...
The change in the groundwater level led to high salt concentrations in the water table. The continuous high level of the water table led to soil salination. Use of humic acids may prevent excess salination, especially given excessive irrigation. [16] Humic acids can fix both anions and cations and eliminate them from root zones. [citation needed]
Humus refers to organic matter that has been decomposed by soil microflora and fauna to the point where it is resistant to further breakdown. Humus usually constitutes only five percent of the soil or less by volume, but it is an essential source of nutrients and adds important textural qualities crucial to soil health and plant growth. [158]
As far as plants and vegetation are concerned, the accumulation of salts in the soil adversely affects their physiology and morphology by increasing the osmotic pressure of the soil solution, altering the plant’s mineral nutrition, and accumulating specific ions to toxic concentrations in the plants.
Human practices can increase the salinity of soils by the addition of salts in irrigation water. Proper irrigation management can prevent salt accumulation by providing adequate drainage water to leach added salts from the soil. Disrupting drainage patterns that provide leaching can also result in salt accumulations.