There are many elements essential to sustaining life and these elements, like energy, are not created or destroyed, but transfered from form to form and travel through cycles in the environment. Such elements include phosphorus, a vital element in nucleic acids, which cycles through forms in different abiotic and biotic environments and is used, wasted, and restored over and over. The phosphorus cycle can be thought to start in the form of solid rocks and geological formations. The phosphorus is present in rocks in the chemical form of phosphates. The rock, deep underground, rises to the ground surface from plate movements or volcano activations pump it into the air for it to settle on the ground. No longer beneath the ground, he phosphorus is exposed to weather. Here, the phosphorus in rocks is weathered by wind, rain, and other disturbances. The deposited phosphorus from the air gets picked up and taken by the runoff. The phosphorus is now dissolved in solution and can leach into soil or run off into water pools. From the soil, the phosphorus gets used by plants to form different molecules. These plants are consumed by primary consumers and the molecules travel up the food chain. Eventually, the phosphorus returns to the soil by decomposers like fungi and certain bacteria. In cases of high run off, the phosphorus leaches out of the soil into the water pools. Here the phosphorus settles to the bottom and eventually forms new sediments and compresses down into rocks and other formations as phosphates once again.
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