Top Ten Biggest Man-Made Changes To The Natural World

People have left a definite physical mark on the planet. Sometimes this mark is made accidentally, but many times it is intentional. This occurs even when that purpose may be destructive. This video covers the top ten biggest man-made changes to the natural world.

First on the list is Lake Peigneur in Louisiana. As the video states, when an oil drill hit a salt mine, it turned an eleven feet deep lake into a thirteen hundred feet deep sinkhole. This was devastating to this aquatic habitat.

Next is Betsiboka Estuary in Madagascar. Removal of the native forest has caused massive soil erosion. How massive? 112 tons per acre annually! This is monstrous.

Number eight on the list is Three Gorges Dam in China. Building the world’s largest power station may have been monumental and at the forefront to many people’s visions, but the downside of this destroyed people’s lives. 1.3 million people were displaced because of this.

Number seven is The Scottish Highlands in Scotland. Scotland is known for its natural landscape beauty and breathtaking scenery. The Highlands were once vast forests stretching on for miles without end. They were the epitome of perfection and tranquility. However, they have been razed by farmers and the ancient Romans for the last 3,900 years. Devastation such as this destroys so much more than just a few trees. This cuts much deeper into our beautiful planet, and there is monumental loss on the earth.

Next is the Amazon Deforestation Project in Brazil. This was actually done in the name of science. A massive study was done in order to understand the effects of deforestation. The problem is that in order to complete the study, huge swaths of rainforest were cut down. This seems to be defeating the entire purpose of studying the problems of deforestation.

The Aral Sea in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan is another extreme example. This was once the fourth largest lakes in the world. However, it no longer stands the same. This may be the most visible difference on the list, and it is absolutely gut wrenching to see the location as it stands today. The Aral Sea was drained by the Soviet irrigation policy.
Bingham Canyon Mine in Utah is the world’s deepest open pit mine. If it were a stadium, it could seat nine million people.

Bravo Crater in Bikini Atoll provides another shocking example. The United States government dropped fifteen megatons of TNT on the island. This created a crater that now stands 6,500 feet wide. This seems absolutely heartless on the government’s part, and it shows a blatant disregard for the natural earth.

Second to last on the list is the Hull-Rust-Mahoning Mine in Minnesota. This open pit iron mine is three and a half miles wide. It was yielded 690 million tons of iron ore that humans have stolen from the earth for our own purposes.

The last example is the Great Wall of China. This wonder of the world is over 2,300 years old, and it spans more than 13,000 miles.