Soil unaffected by seawater in Aceh after tsunami, say scientists

Soil unaffected by seawater in Aceh after tsunami, say scientists

Agence France-Presse, Paris

Fears that the most fertile agricultural land in the Indonesian province of Aceh has been wrecked by seawater that swept inland from the Dec. 26 tsunami are unfounded, scientists say.

Waves swept up to seven kilometers inland as a result of the massive earthquake offshore, killing 131,000 people and covering nearly a third of Aceh's agricultural land with saltwater and sea mud.

The biggest worry has been over rice, the staple food in Aceh, as rice plants are sensitive to salt contamination.

But experts say that salt from the tsunami did not penetrate very far into the coastal clay soils where rice is grown, and that irrigation with salt-free water has been found to solve the problem, the British weekly New Scientist says.

Indeed, aid money to improve irrigation has helped some rice farmers to get better harvests than before the tsunami, it reports in next Saturday's issue.

Peanut farmers, though, have been harder hit because salt penetrates deeper into the sandy soils in which peanuts are grown.

However, there are hopes that when the wet season grows, the rain will wash out a great deal of the salt, improving the chances for next year's crop.

The news is not entirely good, however.

Some rice fields remained slathered with thick sea sediment, and in parts of Aceh's flood plain, changes in drainage patterns wreaked by the tsunami mean that once-rich agricultural land is regularly inundated by seawater that rushes up tidal creeks. Such problems may take as long as a decade to fix.

The research was led by Australian specialist Peter Slavich of the New South Wales Department of Primary Industries, together with scientists from Indonesia's Soil Research Institute.

The tsunami killed an estimated 217,000 people in countries around the northern rim of the Indian Ocean and caused billions of dollars in damage.