Acid Rain and Eutrophication: The Plight of Conodoguinet Creek

he Conodoguinet creek is a creek that runs 101 miles through Cumberland Valley and until it drains into the Susquehanna River. Over the past 40 years, the Conodoguinet Creek has been plagued by two types of pollution, acid rain, and eutrophication. Acid rain is caused by the burning of fossil fuels. The fumes go up into the air and combine with the rain to create acidic substances. Eutrophication is caused by many things, such as fertilizers, detergents, farm runoff, sewage treatment runoff, and even people’s septic tanks. Most of the acid rain pollution in our area comes from traffic, the creation of power, and manufacturing. Sometimes, fumes from manufacturing and power plants are created in the west and are blown eastward because

We used bobbers attached to bamboo rods by string to measure the distance. The distance of the string was different for each location though which is a glaring issue. The time of the areas are the middle of three recordings. My hypothesis is that the water will be faster in shallow water. Here is a chart of the data we received.

From this chart we can see that the depth had no effect on the water. This is because at the speed mostly stays the same except two outliers. Here is the line of best fit for all of the locations depth and speed.

You can see that the depth changes, but not the speed. Except for two outliers in the data because of errors in testing.

Conclusion

My conclusion is that the depth does not affect the water at all. What I can conclude is that the velocity is constant and we had a few hiccups.

Test

I personally did the nitrate test, but there were many more tests that our group did that day. There is the nitrate test, the phosphate test, the alkalinity ppm test, the ph paper test, and our leader collected rocks to test if they can neutralize acids because that means it can resist acidity. Nitrates and phosphates are polyatomic ions that when they go into streams, they will cause overpopulation of algae and mess up the ecosystem. Dissolved oxygen is good and bad for the creek, if there is too much will kill the macroinvertebrates and too little will to. Acid rain is really bad in our area and because of that we had to test the pH of the creek. pH goes on a scale of 0-14, 0 is a very acidic reading and 14 is a very alkaline reading. Things that have a lot of alkalinity will neutralize the acid make it go to 7, which is the default reading and the reading for average water. A lot of our readings are measured in ppm, or parts per