Bioremediation of Agricultural Land Damaged by Tsunami

Abstract

A disaster is the tragedy of a natural or human-made hazard (a hazard is a situation which poses a level of threat to life, health, property, or environment) that negatively affects society or environment. A natural disaster is a consequence when a natural hazard (e.g., volcanic eruption or earthquake) affects humans. Tsunamis and earthquakes are two of the most dangerous and yet most common hazards to affect population centers and economic infra‐ structures worldwide. Generally, tsunami flooding results from a train of long-period waves that can rapidly travel long distances from where they were generated by deep-ocean earth‐ quakes, submarine landslides, volcanic eruptions, or asteroid impacts [1, 2, 3]. Due to tsunami the sea water carry sediments along with salt itself. There have been many studies on recent and ancient tsunami deposits. These include descriptions of tsunami deposits in coastal lake, estuary, lagoon, bay floor and shelf environments and even the farmland [4,5]. The mega earthquake and consequent tsunami had caused a great damage to not only human life and infrastructure but also the agricultural land and the crops in Tohoku region, Japan. The after math of the tsunami has created many problems to environment and geo-environment of these affected areas. Soil pollution and high salinity which caused the farmland unusable for cultivation is one of the major geo-environmental problems. The objective of this study is to get an idea about the extent of soil chemical properties change due to tsunami and to apply bioremediation approach to salinity control of the agricultural land.