Definition of "salination"

Such extension of control diminishes disturbances of the peace, stabilises and thus promotes agricultural industry, and puts a check on the exhaustion and salination of the soil.

1929, Report by His Majesty’s Government in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland to the Council of the League of Nations on the Administration of ‘Iraq for the year 1928‎, London: UK Colonial Office, page 152

If you look down at the Punjab from an aircraft, you will see here and there below you, splotching the green fields like mold on the wall of an old house, patches of gray decay, rising patternless and ominous across the landscape. This is salination, a rotting of the land caused by a rise in the level of the underground water table, which forces the salts of the earth to the surface and gradually turns fields back to desert.

1963, Jan Morris, chapter 7, in The Road to Huddersfield: A Journey to Five Continents‎, New York: Pantheon, page 207

An environmentally conscious population labels the phenomenon of land degradation in Australia (specifically, the erosion of top-soil and salination caused by irrigation after deforestation) as AIDS of the earth; the same metaphor is used in America.

2006, Keith Allan, Kate Burridge, chapter 9, in Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language, Cambridge University Press, page 219

It is evident […] that we ought to find every degree of salination of salt lakes.

1884, Joseph Le Conte, A Compend of Geology‎, New York: Appleton, Part 1, Chapter 2, p. 71

In many of the vast sea-level swamps of the Atlantic side, no slope whatever can be obtained, and here dependence is placed on a grid system of intercepting earthen ditches, communicating with seawater at each end whenever practicable, to insure quick run-off of rain water and thorough salination of every part of the swamps.

1939, James Stevens Simmons, Malaria in Panama, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, Chapter 7 “Sanitary methods used for the control of malaria in the Canal Zone,” p. 189

Disputes revolve around water diversion or reduced water flow, industrial pollution, the salination or siltation of streams, and floods aggravated by soil erosion.

1989, Michael Renner, “Enhancing Global Security” in Lester R. Brown et al., State of the World 1989: A Worldwatch Institute Report on Progress Toward a Sustainable Society, New York: Norton, p. 142