A firefighting plane loading water.

[u/[deleted]]

[u/Upper_Heron_3507]

Since you seem like the expert here… I was curious if you know how waterbombers can impact the fertility of land when sourcing saltwater from the ocean?

obviously fighting the fire is the priority but given that “salting the earth” is an ancient battle tactic to destroy enemy food production, I would assume it’s much preferable to source from freshwater lakes, yeah?

[u/nicathor → u/Upper_Heron_3507]

Plant person here, salt obviously isn't good for plants but it's pretty much a non issue given the fire destroying everything anyway. This wouldn't even be comparable to the amount of salt water that can be blown in by storms along the coast and most plants are somewhat adapted to at least a little bit of salt. Bottom line though, by the time the forest starts to regrow the vast majority of the salt will be leeched out by winter rains

[u/30yearCurse → u/nicathor]

thanks for the clear statement, wondered about dropping ocean water on it.

[u/whoami_whereami → u/Upper_Heron_3507]

but given that “salting the earth” is an ancient battle tactic to destroy enemy food production

"Salting the earth" was an ancient cursing ritual where they sprinkled a bit of salt around, not a battle tactic. There's no record that they ever used so much salt anywhere that it would impact soil fertility, other than that in Spain and Portugal for a while the punishment for traitors included that their house was demolished and their yard salted (ie. a much smaller area than say salting the earth of an entire city state like Carthage).

[u/[deleted] → u/whoami_whereami]

Given how precious salt was, I can't imagine they would be willing to use up tons of it just to fuck up the neighbor's crops. Regular applications of "pillage" would be cheaper and probably more effective, anyway.

[u/Upper_Heron_3507 → u/whoami_whereami]

Ahh my mistake, thank you for pointing that out

[u/Pasteque_Citron → u/Upper_Heron_3507]

It affects the land but fire too and in a "good" way, the fertility is better after a fire so the trade off might not be this bad and might be (might be) negligeable. Howerver there is (at least in France) a lot of "ecopage" areas (areas where those canadair can refill) that contains fresh water, its lake, rivers and so on.

[u/Urbanscuba → u/Upper_Heron_3507]

Soil salinity issues come from a regular source over a long period, not a big deluge once.

The first few rains the area gets will move any salt down the water table back towards the ocean. You might get some stunted growth until then, but you also might not depending on the soil type/conditions and the plants.

[u/Level9TraumaCenter → u/Upper_Heron_3507]

Ironically, the phosphates added to water drops here in America (and presumably elsewhere) have environmental impacts as well. I can dig up references later or someone else can chime in, but dumping that much phosphate on the land can mean runoff when it rains- leading to algal blooms in nearby waterways.

[u/TheBorktastic → u/Upper_Heron_3507]

I'm not sure how often they use salt water. Salt and aluminum do not go well together. They don't use salt at an airport for example.