As man strieves for better living standards through urbanization and industrialization, the earths environment, including the atmosphere is continuously degraded due to pollution.The environment is limitless but am only going to look into the some parts of the environment in this mini series and the activities which degrades or affect our environment. we will be looking at the **LITHOSPHERE** and how its been degraded by our industrial activities and some of its effect on the ecosystem.

### <center>LITHOSPHERE</center>

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The lithosphere  is the earths surface, which is the present surface of  the earth which is formed as a result of operations denudation,  destruction or wearing away and the other of deposition, construction or building-up. Denudation prevails on the land areas, deposition on the sea floor. The processes of denudation and deposition at any one moment together make up the surface of the earth. It is also a  Rigid, rocky outer layer of the Earth, consisting of the crust and the solid outermost layer of the upper mantle. It extends to a depth of about 60 mi (100 km). It is broken into about a dozen separate, rigid blocks, or plates. Slow convection currents deep within the mantle, generated by radioactive heating of the interior, are believed to cause the lateral movements of the plates (and the continents that rest on top of them) at a rate of several inches per year.
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<center>[image credit](https://www.britannica.com/science/lithosphere)</center>
The lithosphere is polluted through soil, industrial effluents and erosion, the solid portion of the earth is composed of rocks and minerals which in turn, comprise the continental masses and ocean basins, the rocks of the lithosphere are of three basic types:

* Igneous 
* Sedimentary 
* Metamorphic .

 Most of what we know as lithosphere has been learnt through the study of surface materials on the earths surface and its effect on our surroundings, however by means of deep bore holes and seismological studies, geologists have gathered valuable information abouts the earths surface and its interior. The lithosphere has been divided into three din stint zones namely the crust, the mantle and the core.

<center>Properties of the Lithosphere</center>

>Aside from the fact that we are living on it, the lithosphere is where many of the geologic processes that affect us originate. The movement of large pieces of the lithosphere account for the global locations of volcanoes, earthquakes, and mountain ranges, as well as the shape and location of our modern continents. Interesting, huh? Let's look at the physical characteristics of the compounds that make up the lithosphere.
[Source](https://study.com/academy/lesson/the-lithosphere-definition-composition-quiz.html)

The lithosphere is made up of rocks from two of the Earth's major layers. It contains all of the outer, thin shell of the planet, called the crust, and the uppermost part of the next-lower layer, the mantle. The thickness of the lithosphere varies; it's thickest below the continents and thinnest at the mid-ocean ridges, raised areas of the seafloor where new seafloor crust is formed.

>The thing all of the rocks in the lithosphere have in common is the way in which they respond to forces applied to them. At the relatively low temperatures found near the Earth's surface, rocks tend to break under stress. Farther down, as temperature and pressure increase, the more likely it is that rocks will be able to accommodate stress by changing shape, or deforming, compressing, stretching, and bending, rather than breaking.
[source](https://study.com/academy/lesson/the-lithosphere-definition-composition-quiz.html)

At some critical depth, the temperature will be high enough that rocks actually start behaving like a viscous fluid rather than a brittle solid. That depth is defined as the bottom of the lithosphere. Below the base of the lithosphere, rocks are hot enough that they actually deform by flowing, even though they remain solid due to the high confining pressure produced by the weight of the rocks above. That layer on which the lithosphere rests is known as the asthenosphere.

The physical connection between the lithosphere and the asthenosphere generates a considerable amount of pushing and pulling on the lithosphere as the rocks below move around. In response, the lithosphere has broken into about a dozen large pieces, called lithospheric plates, or simply plates. The movement of the plates away from, towards, and past each other is known as plate tectonics.