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THE NATURAL ENVIRONMENT

By Charity

The natural environment consist of living organisms and on-living organisms. Its an environment whereby all living organisms interact with one another. The Natural environment is used as habitat for living organisms. The earth is the third planet from the sun and it has a layered structure, and these layers are the inner core, the outer core, the lower mantle, the upper mantle, the lithosphere and the crust. When we talk about earth science generally we emphasize on the spheres, the lithosphere, the hydrosphere, the atmosphere and the biosphere, as a correspondent to rock, water, air and life. The earth's crust is the outer layer of the planet and it is different from the mantle, as the crust is solid and the mantle is molten rock. Convection causes the crust to move slowly some distance apart or towards. Volcanoes are caused by the melting of the crust or the rising of the mantle and this usually takes place at mid-ocean ridges and mantle plumes.

An ocean is a major body if water consisting of salt. We have three main oceans, the Pacific ocean, the Atlantic ocean, the Indian ocean. Whereby the largest ocean is the Pacific ocean. A river is a natural watercourse flowing towards some other watercourses. The river contains freshwater. The structure of the river consists of a channel, stream bed, banks, floodplain etc. The water in the river is usually collected from rainfall. The atmosphere consists of different types of gases namely nitrogen, oxygen, argon, carbon dioxide and inert gases, the remaining gases are trace gases. Some industrial pollutants can also be present in the atmosphere such as chlorine, fluorine compounds, sulfur compounds etc. The atmosphere has five main layers namely, the Exosphere, Thermosphere, Mesosphere, Stratosphere and troposphere. The ozone layer protects us from the harmful UV rays. The atmosphere traps heat during the night in order to reduce the extreme daily temperature.

Global warming is the rising in the world temperature or climate. Global warming will cause the polar ice to melt and these will result in flood causing damage to properties and take away some people's lives. It will also damage the plant and animal species. The earth consists of living organisms such as plants, animals, protoctists, fungi, prokaryotes and viruses, but there is a debate about a virus being classified as living and also as non-living at times. The ecosystem consist of all plants and animals and abiotic and biotic factors.

We have some different types of ecosystems on the world namely, the savanna, desert, tropical rain forest etc. These different ecosystems have different characteristics. In the ecosystem, there are a lot of cycles that can take place, namely the water cycle, the nitrogen cycle, carbon cycle, oxygen cycle, phosphorus cycle etc. The water cycle takes place when it is too hot the sunlight heats the ground causing water to evaporate from the earth's surface. Then it rises up the air and condensation takes place. Afterwards the rainfall will occur and water will fall back into the river. The carbon cycle, carbon dioxide gets into the atmosphere in two ways; which is during respiration and pollution from the industries. The carbon dioxide is obtained from the atmosphere through photosynthesis.

Wikipedia have been used.