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.

Source: wiktionary

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.

Source: wiktionary

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.

Source: wiktionary

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

Source: wiktionary