WordNet
n. the washing away of soil by the flow of water
Wikipedia
Soil erosion is one form of soil degradation. The erosion of soil is a naturally occurring process on all land. The agents of soil erosion are water and wind, each contributing a significant amount of soil loss each year. Soil erosion may be a slow process that continues relatively unnoticed, or it may occur at an alarming rate causing serious loss of topsoil. The loss of soil from farmland may be reflected in reduced crop production potential, lower surface water quality and damaged drainage networks.
While erosion is a natural process, human activities have increased by 10-40 times the rate at which erosion is occurring globally. Excessive (or accelerated) erosion causes both "on-site" and "off-site" problems. On-site impacts include decreases in agricultural productivity and (on natural landscapes) ecological collapse, both because of loss of the nutrient-rich upper soil layers. In some cases, the eventual end result is desertification. Off-site effects include sedimentation of waterways and eutrophication of water bodies, as well as sediment-related damage to roads and houses. Water and wind erosion are the two primary causes of land degradation; combined, they are responsible for about 84% of the global extent of degraded land, making excessive erosion one of the most significant environmental problems world-wide.
Intensive agriculture, deforestation, roads, anthropogenic climate change and urban sprawl are amongst the most significant human activities in regard to their effect on stimulating erosion. However, there are many prevention and remediation practices that can curtail or limit erosion of vulnerable soils.
Usage examples of "soil erosion".
Hardwood logging in the Thai-Cambodian border region had led to massive soil erosion in the upper reaches of Cambodia’.
Sanjong was a Nepali military officer assigned to help a team of scientists studying soil erosion in the Himalaya.
It had all evaporated when the economy down-turned at the start of the new century and the soil erosion began to hit.
With the old digging and a fair bit of soil erosion, all the topsoil has been removed so the River Red Gum have given it a big miss, its seed carried by the wind over the gap to continue along the course higher up.
In ten-twenty-thirty years the trees would fight off soil erosion.
That sort of ignorance leads to typhus and soil erosion and people freezing to death and invasions of social workers who take your children away.
Do you know what that will do to the runoff and the soil erosion around here?
There were fields of Sol-style grasses, probably imported to halt soil erosion and to provide the grains so beloved of Solarians.