Environmental geology and geohazards

Is there a future for coal?

Published on June 17, 2021 by zooks777Leave a comment

Burning coal is far and away the main culprit for elevated atmospheric CO₂and global climatic warming. That is a consequence of the Industrial Revolution and a mode of production that centres on the market value of commodities rather than their intrinsic usefulness and thus on the continual generation of profit. As the main original energy source for this capitalist mode, whose viability depends on incessant economic growth, world coal production grew at an exponential rate through the 19^th and 20^th centuries, as did its influence on global climate. Beginning in the 1920s, coal was joined by other carbon-based fossil fuels (oil and natural gas) in massively increasing energy and greenhouse-gas production. In the data there is little sign of an appetite to reduce this dependence on carbon burning, renewable energy output accounting today for only a few percent of the energy demands of capital. Although coal’s energy contribution is flattening off to be replaced by those of oil and gas, in terms of CO₂ emissions it still dominates. That is because oil and gas are carbon-hydrogen compounds rather than almost pure carbon in the case of coal. Unless burning fossil fuels is outlawed and economic growth is drastically curtailed, we are set to live on a far warmer planet.

Growth in energy supply from different sources since 1800 CE (Credit: ourworldindata.org)

For various reasons coal is unique in a social sense. Every producing area has large communities who depend on mining for income. Britain now produces vastly less coal than it did up to the 1990s, with wholesale closure of underground mines. Since 1960 these communities have lost over half a million jobs in mining, let alone those in related industries and those that served mining communities. Three decades on from the last round of closures, those communities remain socially devastated in many respects. A huge amount of coal still lies beneath them. Can it make a come-back? A recent study suggests that perhaps it can, with diametrically opposite environmental consequences.

It seems that surfaces of coal particles are able to take-up and store gases, increasingly so as pressure increases. Miners faced the consequences of that in the form of adsorbed carbon dioxide and methane (‘choke damp’ and ‘fire damp’) that were released when coal was mined underground. Miners’ safety lamps (invented in 1815 by Humphry Davy) enable them to monitor the risks of suffocation by CO₂ or explosion of CH₄ when the lamps dim or flare, respectively. Engineers at Edith Cowan University in Perth, Western Australia, experimentally measured the amounts of hydrogen adsorbed by crushed coal at different pressures (Iglauer, S et al. 2021. Hydrogen adsorption on sub-bituminous coal: Implications for hydrogen geostorage. Geophysical Research Letters, v. 48, article 2021GL092976; DOI: 10.1029/2021GL092976). From surface atmospheric pressure to 40 times that, adsorption increases rapidly, especially for hydrogen (from 0.05 to 0.25 grams per kilogram). At higher pressures it rises less rapidly to about 0.6 g kg^-1 at 100 times atmospheric pressure, which is equivalent to a depth of about 500 m in a sedimentary rock formation. At deeper levels hydrogen adsorption remains about the same.

The experimental results suggest that large amounts of hydrogen can be stored in coal at quite shallow depths. The potential storage in a ton of fractured coal is about 600 kg, equivalent to about 12 cubic metres of liquid hydrogen, but without the need for containment and refrigeration. In the absence of oxygen, such storage would be safe and long-term. If feasible from an engineering standpoint, underground storage of hydrogen in coal seams to overcome one of the current barriers to a hydrogen-based industrial economy through the storage of energy generated by carbon-free technologies, such as wind, wave, tidal and solar generation that operate at highly variable rates, not suited to energy use patterns. Effectively, coalfields could become giant ‘batteries’ without the need to mine vast amounts of elements, such as lithium, needed for conventional batteries; provided that a sustainable means of repeated hydrogen recovery can be devised. A central technology of a future ‘hydrogen economy’ is that of the fuel cell in which hydrogen and oxygen combine using a catalyst to generate electricity, without any combustion and emitting only water vapour.

Volcanism and the Justinian Plague

Published on December 5, 2018May 13, 2019 by zooks777Leave a comment

Between 541 and 543 CE, during the reign of the Roman Emperor Justinian, bubonic plague spread through countries bordering the Mediterranean Sea. This was a decade after Justinian’s forces had had begun to restore the Roman Empire’s lost territory in North Africa, Spain, Italy and the present-day Balkans by expeditions out of Byzantium (the Eastern Empire). At its height, the Plague of Justinian, was killing 5000 people each day in Constantinople, eventually to consume 20 to 40% of its population and between 25 to 50 million people across the empire. Like the European Black Death of the middle 14^th century. The bacterium Yersinia pestis originated in Central Asia and is carried in the gut of fleas that live on rats. The ‘traditional’ explanation of both plagues was that plague spread westwards along the Silk Road and then with black rats that infested ship-borne grain cargoes. Plausible as that might seem, Yersinia pestis, fleas and rats have always existed and remain present to this day. Trade along the same routes continued unbroken for more than two millennia. Although plagues with the same agents recurred regularly, only the Plague of Justinian and the Black Death resulted in tens of million deaths over short periods. Some other factor seems likely to have boosted fatalities to such levels.

407458aa.2 — Monk administering the last rites to victims of the Plague of Justinian

Five years before plague struck the Byzantine historian Procopius recorded a long period of fog and haze that continually reduced sunlight; typical features of volcanic aerosol veils. Following this was the coldest decade in the past 2300 years, as recorded by tree-ring studies. It coincides with documentary evidence of famine in China, Ireland, the Middle East and Scandinavia.. A 72 m long ice core extracted from the Colle Gnifetti glacier in the Swiss Alps in 2013 records the last two millennia of local climatic change and global atmospheric dust levels. Sampled by laser slicing, the core has yielded a time series of data at a resolution of months or better. In 536 an Icelandic volcano emitted ash and probably sulfur dioxide over 18 months during which summer temperature fell by about 2°C. A second eruption followed in 540 to 541. ‘Volcanic winter’ conditions lasted from 536 to 545, amplifying the evidence from tree-ring data from the 1990’s.

The Plague of Justinian coincided with the second ‘volcanic winter’ after several years of regional famine. This scenario is paralleled by the better documented Great Famine of 1315-17 that ended the two centuries of economic prosperity during the 11^th to 13^th centuries. The period was marked by extreme levels of crime, disease, mass death, and even cannibalism and infanticide. In a population weakened through malnutrition to an extent that we can barely imagine in modern Europe, any pandemic disease would have resulted in the most affected dying in millions. Another parallel with the Plague of Justinian is that it followed the ending of four centuries of the Medieval Warm Period, during which vast quantities of land were successfully brought under the plough and the European population had tripled. That ended with a succession of major, sulfur-rich volcanic eruption in Indonesia at the end of the 13^th century that heralded the Little Ice Age. Although geologists generally concern themselves with the social and economic consequences of a volcano’s lava and ash in its immediate vicinity– the ‘Pompeii view’ – its potential for global catastrophe is far greater in the case of really large (and often remote) events.

Chemical data from the same ice core reveals the broad economic consequences of the mid-sixth century plague. Lead concentrations in the ice, deposited as airborne pollution from smelting of lead sulfide ore to obtain silver bullion, fell and remained at low levels for a century. The recovery of silver production for coinage is marked by a spike in glacial lead concentration in 640; another parallel with the Black Death, which was followed by a collapse in silver production, albeit only for 4 to 5 years.

Related article: Gibbons, A. 2018. Why 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’. Science, v. 362,p. 733-734; DOI:10.1126/science.aaw0632

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The risk of landslides in Africa

Published on October 18, 2018 by zooks777Leave a comment

The most widespread risk from natural hazards is, with little doubt, that posed by ground instability; landslides and landslips; mudflows; rock avalanches and a range of other categories in which large volumes of surface material are set in motion. They can be triggered by earthquakes, volcanism or heavy rainfall that changes the physical properties of rock and soil. Not only steep slopes pose a risk, for some affect ground with quite gentle topography, as witness the terrible scenes from Sulawesi triggered by the 28 September 2018 magnitude 7.5 earthquake beneath the Minhasa Peninsula. This set in motion mudflows on gently sloping ground when the seismic waves caused liquefaction of unconsolidated sediments that not only shattered dwellings by the lateral motion, but whole communities sank into the slurry with little trace. The rapid events left a death toll confirmed at 2010 people with about 5000 missing, feared to have been swallowed by the earth. In the last 9 months mass movement has resulted in fatalities in many places, the most publicised being in Uganda, Japan, Philippines, Sulawesi, Ethiopia, Sumatra, South India, Bangladesh, California, Nepal, and the list grows as it does every year.

As well as purely natural causes, human activities, such as deforestation, excavations and dumping of materials, greatly exacerbate risks. The South Wales former coal-mining communities commemorate every year the collapse of a mine spoil heap on a steep hillside on 21 October 1966 that engulfed a primary school at Aberfan, killing 116 small children and 28 adults. Wherever they occur, there seems to be little chance of escape for those in their path. Slowly it has become possible for geoscientists to outline areas that are potentially at risk from catastrophic mass wastage, sometimes from the distribution of scars of previous events on remotely sensed images, but increasingly by multivariate analysis of landscapes in terms of the factors that may contribute to future ground failures. The principal ones are: topographic slope and relief; annual rainfall, especially the likely precipitation in a single day; vegetation cover, particularly by trees; strength of surface rock and soils, including degrees of consolidation, interbedding and water content; geological structure, such as the trajectory of faults, degree of jointing and the dip of strata. Modelling risk has to grapple with the global scale of the problem, which cannot be addressed in the least developed regions by piecemeal local studies, although those are urgent, of course, in areas with recorded instances of catastrophic ground failure. Regional studies can screen vast areas of probably low risk so that meagre resources can focus on those that appear to be most dangerous to populated places.

afr landslide — Degree of risk from landslides of all types in the northern part of the East African Rift System (Credit: Broeckx et al. 2018; Fig. 6)

Belgian engineering geologists and GIS specialists have assembled a monumental risk assessment of Africa, together with a bibliography of all published work on mass movement across the continent (Broeckx, J. et al. 2018. A data-based landslide susceptibility map of Africa. Earth-Science Reviews, v. 185, p. 102-121; DOI: 10.1016/j.earscirev.2018.05.002). They point out that Google Earth’s 3-D viewing potential at fine spatial resolution provides a free and rapid means of mapping scars of previous earth movements in considerable detail over areas that data analysis suggests to be susceptible. Their paper provides continent-scale maps of the parameters that they used as well as maps showing several versions of their risk analysis. The supplementary data to the paper include downloadable, full-resolution maps of landslide susceptibility.

How rich are deep-sea resources?

Published on April 20, 2018 by zooks777Leave a comment

My first task as a Lecturer in Earth Sciences at the British Open University, from 1971 onward, was to write teaching materials about the economics, formation and geological setting of metal resources. Much of the content was about the full range of ‘conventional’ metal ores, but something being publicised as having huge potential intrigued me. This concerned manganese-rich nodules (with the aesthetic appeal of unwashed potatoes) and crusts found sitting on top of sediments of the abyssal ocean floor, at depths between 3 to 5 kilometres. While manganese is by no means a rare element and occurs in vast ore reserves on the continents, the nodules contain unusually high concentrations of other, more valuable metals, such as copper, nickel, zinc, cobalt and lead. Some contained more than 3% of Cu, Ni and Co combined, above the ‘grades’ of economic deposits of ores of the individual metals on land. This was the source of their potential: simple, albeit very deep dredging of the nodules would provide multi-metal ore of very high profitability. Moreover, the nodules are in truly vast tonnages (about 10 kg m^-2) and continually grow by precipitation from seawater in the underlying sediments at a few millimetres per million years – they are renewable resources.

A variety of reasons, not the least of which was the vexatious question of ownership of sea-floor resources far from land, have meant that commercial operations have yet to begin. However, spiralling prices for metals on the world market together with depletion of on-shore, high-grade reserves are beginning to make the opportunity of nodule mining irresistible. Fifteen companies, with licence areas issued by the intergovernmental International Seabed Authority of around 75 000 km² each, are now engaged in economic assessment of one of the most remote swathes of the Pacific abyssal plains (Peacock, T. & Alford M.H. 2018. Is deep-sea mining worth it? Scientific American, v. 318(5) (May 2018 issue), p. 63-67). There are several controversial issues surrounding deep-sea mining. First, dredging, like beam trawling disturbs and destroys ocean-floor ecosystems and turns bottom water turbid, the very fine grain size of sediments resulting in settling being very slow ( about 1 mm s^-1). Second, preliminary ore processing on board dredging vessels results in plumes of turbid and metal-rich slurry in the wakes, threatening surface and mid-water ecosystems. Such plumes will rapidly spread far from operational areas in surface current systems, eventually to smother pristine areas of ocean floor. Re-examination of areas of experimental dredging from 30 years ago have revealed that they are still sterile of lifeforms larger than 50 micrometres. Added to these effects, onshore processing will produce large amounts of waste – about 75% of the volume of dredged nodules. Conventional mines eventually backfill their excavations, but with nodule mining disposal would be an environmental nightmare.

Japanese sea-floor mining machine. (credit: Japan Times)

Economically, it seems that nodule dredging is potentially highly profitable. To break even requires lifting about a million metric tons, which would yield of the order of 37 000 t of Ni, 32 000 t of Cu, 6000 t of Co and 750 000 t manganese. If all 15 companies begin extraction, production at these levels will have a downward effect on world metal prices, tending to undercut production from conventional mines. One little-considered issue is that the ‘blend’ of metals from nodules will not match the industrial demand for each of them, further destabilising markets. Added to mining of the abyssal plains, plans are well advanced for multi-metal mining of massive sulfide deposits forming at hydrothermal vents or ‘black smokers’ along mid-ocean ridge systems, in which gold figures strongly. Only a few Pacific island states have resisted the ‘promise’ of such operations. Japanese companies are already mining the seabed off Okinawa within their own offshore waters and seemingly are producing zinc equivalent to the country’s annual consumption as well as gold, copper and lead.

Volcano heading for the sea

Published on March 27, 2018 by zooks777Leave a comment

John Murray of The Open University, UK has been studying Europe’s largest active volcano Mount Etna on Sicily for most of his career. With a group of colleagues he installed high-precision GPS receivers at over 100 stations on the flanks of the mountain. This was to monitor any shifts in elevation and geographic position, which might be related to magmatic events within the volcano, such as inflation and contraction of the magma chamber. Measurements of position gathered annually since 2001 reveal a somewhat alarming picture (Murray, J.B. et al. 2018. Gravitational sliding of the Mt. Etna massif along a sloping basement. Bulletin of Volcanology, v. 80 online, open access; doi /10.1007/s00445-018-1209-1). The edifice is moving relentlessly ESE at 14 mm yr^-1, on average, towards the Mediterranean Sea. Research by one of Murray’s co-authors, Benjamin van Wyk de Vries of the Université Clermont Auvergne, established that many volcanoes have associated signs of deformation due to their huge masses. Often, this is a matter of radial spreading that produces thrust-like faults at their base and in the basement on which they grew. In the case of Etna all the annual displacements on its flanks are skewed to the ESE. The researchers are able to show that this is not a case of flank instability that ultimately may result in lateral collapse but the entire volcano is slowly slipping sideways.

An experimental mock up of the volcano– a cone and flanking layers of lava and pyroclastic rocks made of sand on a substrate of putty to represent underlying sedimentary strata – began to slide once it was tilted at a shallow angle. This suggests that the base of the volcano and igneous debris that it has emitted dips gently to the ESE. The underlying materials are poorly consolidated Quaternary sediments, which are likely to be rheologically weak. Geophysics shows that the NW side of the volcano rests on an almost horizontal plateau, the cone itself being above a spoon-like depression, probably produced by the cone’s mass, and the base dips seawards in the SE sector. It is through this basement that magma makes its way to Etna’s summit vent system, probably along fractures.

The authors warn that such sliding volcanoes are prone to devastating sector collapse on the downslope side, although there are no signs that might be imminent. Yet it will almost certainly have an effect on eruptive activity as the magma conduits are continually changing. Future research needs to focus on periods when there is horizontal contraction on the volcano, as happens during lengthy periods of dormancy – the period for which there are data has been one of expansion.

Large earthquakes and the length of the day

Published on November 14, 2017 by zooks777Leave a comment

Geoscientists have become used to the idea that long-term global climate shifts are cyclical, as predicted by Milutin Milanković. The periods of shifts in the Earth’s orbital and rotational parameters are of the order of tens to hundreds of thousand years. The gravitational reasons why they occur have been known since the 1920s when Milanković came up with his hypothesis, and they were confirmed fifty years later. But there are plenty of other cycles with shorter periods. The last 115 years of worldwide records for earthquakes with magnitudes greater than 7 whose changing annual frequency shows a clear cyclical period of about 32 years. The records show peaks in 1910, 1943, 1970 and 2011 (see Bendick, R. & Bilham, R. 1917. Do weak global stresses synchronize earthquakes? Geophysical Research Letters, v. 44 online; doi/10.1002/2017GL074934). Unlike Milanković cycles, these oscillations were not predicted, but something synchronous with them must be forcing this behavior: a sort of “cross-talk”. Either global seismicity has a tendency for events to trigger others elsewhere on the Earth or some other process is periodically engaging with major brittle deformation to give it a nudge.

Rebecca Bendick, of the University of Montana, Missoula, and Roger Bilham of the University of Colorado, Boulder used a complex statistical method to check for synchronicity between the seismic cycles and other repetitive phenomena. It turns out that there is a close match with historic data for the length of the day which varies by several milliseconds. At first sight this may seem odd, until one realizes that day length is governed by the Earth’s speed of rotation (about 460 m s^-1 at the Equator). The correlation is between increases in both major seismicity and the length of the day; i.e. quakes increase as rotation slows. Day length can vary by a millisecond over a year or so during el Niño, which involves shifts of vast masses of Pacific Ocean water that affect rotation. But what of larger changes on a three-decade cycle? Seismic events and the forces that they release result from buildup of strain in the lithosphere, so the episodic earthquake maxima require some kind of transfer of momentum within the Earth. It does not need to be large, as the Milanković astronomical forcing of climate demonstrates, just a regular pulse.

One possibility is that, as rotation decelerates, decoupling between the liquid outer core and the solid mantle may change the flow of molten iron-nickel alloy. That may be sufficient to transmit momentum and thus stress through the plastic mantle to the brittle lithosphere so that areas of high elastic strain are pushed beyond the rocks’ strength so that they fail. There are indeed signs that the geomagnetic field also changes with day length on a decadal basis (Voosen, P. 2017. Sloshing of Earth’s core may spike big quakes. Science, v. 358, p. 575; doi:10.1126/science.358.6363.575). Rotational deceleration began in 2011, and if the last century’s trend holds there may be an extra five large earthquakes next year. Could the deadly 7.3 magnitude earthquake at the Iran-Iraq border on 12 November 2017 be the start? If so, will the 32-year connection improve currently unreliable earthquake forecasting? Probably the best we can expect is increased global readiness. The study has nothing to add as regards which areas are at risk: although there is clustering in time there is none with location, even on the regional scale.

A fully revised edition of Steve Drury’s book Stepping Stones: The Making of Our Home World can now be downloaded as a free eBook



http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/iranians-salvage-their-furniture-and-household-appliances-news-photo/874026786

Iranians salvage their furniture and household appliances from damaged buildings in the town of Sarpol-e Zahab in Iran’s western Kermanshah province near the border with Iraq, on November 14, 2017

Shock and Er … wait a minute

Published on October 6, 2017 by zooks777Leave a comment

Chicxulub2 — Enhanced gravity map of the Chicxulub crater (credit: Wikipedia)

Michael Rampino has produced a new book (Rampino, M.R. 2017. Cataclysms: A New Geology for the Twenty-First Century. Columbia University Press; New York). As the title subtly hints, Rampino is interested in mass extinctions and impacts; indeed quite a lot more, as he lays out a hypothesis that major terrestrial upheavals may stem from gravitational changes during the Solar System’s progress around the Milky Way galaxy. Astronomers reckon that this 250 Ma orbit involves wobbling through the galactic plane and possibly varying distributions of mass – stars, gas, dust and maybe dark matter – in a 33 Ma cycle. Changing gravitational forces affecting the Solar System may possibly fling small objects such as comets and asteroids towards the Earth on a regular basis. In the 1980s and 90s Rampino and others linked mass extinctions, flood-basalt outpourings and cratering events, with a 27 Ma periodicity. So the books isn’t entirely new, though it reads pretty well.

Such ideas have been around for decades, but it all kicked off in 1980 when Luis and Walter Alvarez and co-workers published their findings of iridium anomalies at the K-Pg boundary and suggested that this could only have arisen from a major asteroid impact. Since it coincided with the mass extinction of dinosaurs and much else besides at the end of the Cretaceous it could hardly be ignored. Indeed their chance discovery launched quite a bandwagon. The iridium-rich layer also included glass spherules, shocked mineral grains, soot and other carbon molecules –nano-scale diamonds, nanotubes and fullerenes whose structure is akin to a geodesic dome – and other geochemical anomalies. Because the Chicxulub crater off the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico is exactly the right age and big enough to warrant a role in the K-Pg extinction, these lines of evidence have been widely adopted as the forensic smoking gun for other impacts. In the last 37 years every extinction event horizon has been scrutinized to seek such an extraterrestrial connection, with some success, except for exactly coincident big craters.

The K-Pg event is the only one that shows a clear temporal connection with a small mountain falling out of the sky, most of the others seeming to link with flood basalt events and their roughly cyclical frequency – but hence Rampino’s Shiva hypothesis that impacts may have caused the launch of mantle plumes from the core-mantle boundary. Others have used the ‘smoking gun’ components to link lesser events to a cosmic cause, the most notorious being the 2007 connection to the extinction of the North American Pleistocene megafauna and the start of the Younger Dryas return of glacial conditions. Since 1980 alternative mechanisms for producing most of the impact-connected materials have been demonstrated. It emerged in 2011 that nano-diamonds and fullerenes may form in a candle flame and their global distribution could be due to forest fires. And now it seems that shocked mineral grains can form during a lightning strike (Chen, J. et al. 2017. Generation of shock lamellae and melting in rocks by lightning-induced shock waves and electrical heating. Geophysical Research Letters, v. 44, p. 8757-8768; doi:10.1002/2017GL073843). Shocked or not, quartz and feldspar grains are resistant enough to be redistributed into sediments. Although platinum-group metals, such as iridium, are likely to be mainly locked away in Earth’s core, some volcanic exhalations and many flood basalts – especially those with high titanium contents – significantly are enriched in them. So even the Alvarez’s evidence for a K-Pg impact has an alternative explanation. Rampino is to be credited for acknowledging that in his book.

An awful lot of ideas about rare yet dreadful events in the biosphere depend, like many criminal cases, on the ‘weight of evidence’ and defy absolute proof. The evidence generally permits alternatives, such the cunning Verneshot hypothesis for the extinction-flood basalt connection supported by one of the founders of plate tectonics, W. Jason Morgan. As regards The K-Pg extinction, it is certain that a very large mass did fall on Chicxulub at the time of the mass extinction, whereas the Deccan flood basalts span a million years or so either side. But the jury is out on whether either or both did the deed. For other events of this scale and larger ones the money is on internal origins. As for Rampino’s galactic hypothesis, the statistics are decidedly dodgy, but chasing down more forensics is definitely on the cards.

English: From source; an animation showing the... — Animation showing the Chicxulub Crater impact. ( credit: University of Arizona, Space Imagery Center)

Water-borne arsenic back in the news

Published on August 29, 2017 by zooks777Leave a comment

In the 1980s grim news began to emerge from the Indian State of West Bengal and a decade later from neighbouring Bangladesh. Villagers from the low-lying delta plains of the Ganges and Brahmaputra river systems at the head of the Bay of Bengal began to present at clinics with disfiguring skin lesions or keratoses on hands and feet, loss of feeling in fingers and toes and dark skin patches on their torsos. The latter were colloquially known as ‘black rain’. The victims were often stigmatised, as their neighbours believed they were suffering from leprosy. These symptoms were followed a few years later by increased incidences of lung, liver, kidney and bladder cancers. The first medical practitioner to recognise these typical signs of chronic arsenic poisoning in 1983, Dr Depankar Chakraborti of Kolkata, was branded as a ‘panic monger’ by local authorities. His warnings, backed by evidence published by the World Health Organisation (WHO) in 1988 that there was a connection with high arsenic levels in West Bengal drinking water supplies from new tubewells, went largely unheeded for a decade. Tragically, as it turned out, thousands of tubewells had been sunk in the Bengali delta plains from the 1970s onwards, aimed at reducing the risk of disease from pathogens in the previously used surface water from ponds and streams. After a conference on the perceived problem, organized in Kolkata by Dr Chakraborti in 1995, the WHO declared the situation in Bangladesh to be a ‘Major Public Health Issue’, and the world’s press took up the story. Clearly, millions of Bengali villagers were at risk or were already suffering from chronic arsenic poisoning. By the late 1990s thousands of samples of tubewell waters from the delta plains had been analysed, many of which revealed arsenic levels far above the 10 μg l^-1 safe threshold. In 2002, 400 Bangladeshi victims sued the British Geological Survey (BGS) for negligence. The BGS had analysed 150 water samples from the Bangladesh delta plains in 1992 and had not reported any risks, but arsenic was not among the elements being analysed. The civil action eventually failed.

Skin lesions or keratoses that are symptomatic of chronic arsenic poisoning

Almost two decades after the arsenic scandal on the eastern side of the subcontinent well-water analyses showing high arsenic values have been published from the Indus plains of Pakistan (Podorski, J.E. et al. 2017. Extensive arsenic contamination in high-pH unconfined aquifers in the Indus Valley. Science Advances, v. 3,; doi:10.1126/wsciadv.1700935). The Indus catchment having a similar Himalayan source and being at a similar latitude it has long been considered to be at potential risk from arsenic derived from its thick alluvial sediments. The Swiss-Pakistani-Chinese team have produced geochemical data from 1200 tubewells throughout the catchment within Pakistan. A swath from Lahore to Karachi, with the country’s greatest population density, is at high risk of water with arsenic concentrations above the WHO guideline safe concentration, suggesting some 50 to 60 million people being subject to its hazard.

Although the geological setting is similar to that in the Bengal plains, a different natural chemical process causes the high concentrations ultimately from the iron hydroxide veneer on sediment grains which selectively absorbs several trace elements, including arsenic, from river water. In Bangladesh arsenic is released from sediments as a result of highly reducing conditions due to organic matter buried in some layers of alluvium, by a process known as reductive dissolution – when insoluble ferric iron (Fe³⁺) hydroxide (goethite) is exposed to a ready supply of electrons the iron is reduced to the soluble ferrous (Fe²⁺) form and the mineral breaks down to release its absorbed trace elements. Most of the alluvium in the Indus plain contains little organic carbon, so another mechanism is implicated. The high arsenic levels correlate with high pH in the groundwater and therefore seem most likely to be released from goethite grain coatings by alkaline water. That, in turn, is often a product of high evaporation and salinisation from the massive irrigation using groundwater in semi-arid southern Pakistan. The alkaline water then returns to the underlying groundwater in the highly permeable Indus alluvium; i.e. it is a consequence of irrigated agriculture rather than of a natural geochemical process as in more humid Bengal.

Whereas a remedy in Bangladesh and West Bengal has been to sink new tubewells into oxidising alluvial strata (red coloured rather than the reducing grey sediments) that yield water with safe arsenic levels, the risky areas in Pakistan may need expensive use of absorbent filters on a large scale to remove the hazard. Because irrigation using groundwater is on such a large scale on the Indus plain there is also a definite risk of ingesting arsenic from crops produced there, principally rice but also unwashed leaf vegetables

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/08/arsenic-drinking-water-threatens-60-million-pakistan

http://www.dawn.com/news/1353482/50-million-at-risk-of-arsenic-poisoning-in-pakistan?preview

https://www.dawn.com/news/1354023

Gas hydrates: a warning from the past

Published on July 5, 2017 by zooks7771 Comment

Detailed acoustic imaging above the Troll gas field in the northern North Sea off western Norway has revealed tens of thousands of elliptical pits on the seabed. At around 10 to 20 per square kilometre over an area of about 15,000 km² there are probably between 150 to 300 thousand of them. They range between 10 to 100 m across and are about 6 m deep on average, although some are as deep as 20 m. They are pretty much randomly distributed but show alignment roughly parallel to regional N-S sea-floor currents. Many of the world’s continental shelves display such pockmark fields, but the Troll example is among the most extensive. Almost certainly the pockmarks formed by seepage of gas or water to the surface. However, detailed observations suggest they are inactive structures with no sign of bubbles or fluid seepage. Yet the pits cut though glacial diamictites deposited by the most recent Norwegian Channel Ice Stream through which icebergs once ploughed and which is overlain by thin Holocene marine sediments. One possibility is that they record gas loss from the Troll field, another being destabilisation of shallow gas hydrate deposits.

Troll pockmarks — Parts of the Troll pockmark field off Norway. A: density of pockmarks in an area of 169 square km. B: details of a cluster of pockmarks. (Credit: Adriano Mazzini, Centre for Earth Evolution and Dynamics (CEED) University of Oslo)

Norwegian geoscientists have studied part of the field in considerable detail, analysing carbonate-rich blocks and foraminifera in the pits (Mazzini, A. and 8 others 2017. A climatic trigger for the giant Troll pockmark field in the northern North Sea. Earth and Planetary Science Letters, v. 464, p. 24-34; http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.epsl.2017.02.014). The carbonates show very negative δ¹³C values that suggest the carbon in them came from methane, which could indicate either of the two possible means of formation. However, U-Th dating of the carbonates and radiocarbon ages of forams in the marine sediment infill suggest that they formed at around 10 ka ago; 1500 years after the end of the Younger Dryas cold episode and the beginning of the Holocene interglacial. Most likely they represent destabilisation of a once-extensive, shallow layer of methane hydrates in the underlying sediments, conditions during the Younger Dryas having been well within the stability field of gas hydrates. Sporadic leaks from the deeper Troll gas field hosted by Jurassic sandstones is unlikely to have created such a uniform distribution of gas-release pockmarks. Adriano Mazzini and colleagues conclude that rapid early Holocene warming led to sea-floor temperatures and pressures outside the stability field of gas hydrates. There are few signs that hydrates linger in the area, explaining the present inactivity of the pockmarks – all the methane and CO₂ escaped before 10 ka.

Gas hydrates are thought to be present beneath shallow seas today, wherever sea-floor sediments have a significant organic carbon content and within the pressure-temperature window of stability of these strange ice-like materials. Mazzini et al.’s analysis of the Troll pockmark field clearly has profound implications for the possible behaviour of gas hydrates at a time of global climatic warming. As well as their destabilisation adding to methane release from onshore peat deposits currently locked by permafrost and a surge in global warming, there is an even more catastrophic possibility. The whole of the seaboard of the southern North Sea was swept by a huge tsunami about 8000 years ago, which possibly wiped out Mesolithic human occupancy of lowland Britain, the former land mass of Doggerland, and the ‘Low Countries’ of western Europe. This was created by a massive submarine landslide – the Storegga Slide just to the north of the Troll field – which may have been triggered by destabilisation of submarine gas hydrates during early Holocene warming of the oceans.

Scablands: megaflood hypothesis tempered

Published on October 14, 2016 by zooks7771 Comment

The eastern side of Washington State in the US includes a vast, barren area that has been scoured virtually free of superficial sediment, including soils. Its landscape is among the most odd in North America, consisting of a network of unusually wide canyons or couleés that incise a regional plateau formed by the Columbia River flood basalts. The now largely dry canyon floors contain immense potholes, megaripples and erratic boulders, together with strangely streamlined hillocks made of residual, windblown loess deposits, which collectively resemble features of normal river beds but at a gargantuan scale. The canyon network emerges from the Rocky Mountains near the city of Spokane, then criss-crosses what had previously been a wide basalt plain to merge with the Columbia River in southern Washington. The couleés are up to 100 km long and reach 100 m in depth.

Dry Falls, WA Français : Les Dry Falls dans l'... — Dry Falls in Grand Colee, Washington state, US, showing typical features of the Channelle Scablands. (credit: Wikipedia)

In the 1920s J. Harlen Bretz suggested that the Channelled Scablands had been formed by a massive flood, a view that met disbelief until his colleague Joseph Pardee discovered that a huge lake of glacial meltwater (Lake Missouala) had formed in the intricate valleys of the Montana Rockies when their outflow into Washington had been blocked by a southward-surging finger of the Cordilleran ice sheet. Lake Missouala is estimated to have been about half the size of modern Lake Michigan (~7700 km²) and up to 610 m deep, reaching a maximum volume of 2100 km³ between 15 to 13 ka ago. Bretz’s idea was vindicated; melting of the ice dam was widely thought to have produced a single vast outburst flood and the removal of approximately 320 km³ of basalt and loess. The later discovery of strandlines, similar to those on a smaller scale in Glen Roy, western Scotland, on the flanks of former lake modified the theory to a series of individual, but still huge outburst flood events. Their magnitudes, estimated by assuming that each filled the coulees to their brim, were thought to be up to 60 km³per hour, i.e. 100 times greater than the largest recorded historically, that of the Amazon. A recent study tempers the awe long-associated with the Scablands.

Isaac Larsen and Michael Lamb of the University of Massachusetts and the California Institute of Technology examined Moses Couleé, one of the largest, in detail (Larsen, I.J. & Lamb, M.P. 2016. Progressive incision of the Channelled Scablands by outburst floods. Nature, v. 538, p. 229-232; doi;10.1038/nature19817). Terraces in Moses Couleé allow successive topographic profiles of the canyon to be reconstructed, and the flow features on its floor allow water depth during some of the flows to be estimated. Far from being brim-full at any time, except during the first incision, individual discharges of meltwater were probably 5 to 10 times less than those previously suggested. Moreover, the pattern of the Scablands reflects major fracture zones n the Columbia River flood basalts, which suggests that floods followed lines of least resistance and greatest ease of erosion by removal of joint-bound blocks of basalt. Yet the floods still reached a magnitude never recorded for modern ones, and Larsen and Lambs modelling may well apply to the even vaster outburst canyons on Mars, such as Valles Marineris.

See also: Perron, J.T. & Venditti, J.G. 2016, Megafloods downsized. Nature, v. 538, p. 174-175; nature.com/newsandviews

Free course on remote sensing for water exploration

Published on September 26, 2016 by zooks7771 Comment

250 million people who live in the drylands of Africa and Asia face a shortage of water for their entire lives. Hundreds of millions more in less drought-prone regions of the ‘Third World’ have to cope repeatedly with reduced supplies. A rapid and effective assessment of how to alleviate the shortfall of safe water is therefore vital. In arid and semi-arid areas surface water storage is subject to a greater rate of evaporation than precipitation, so groundwater, hidden beneath the land surface, provides a better alternative. Rainwater is also lost by flowing away far more quickly than in areas with substantial vegetation. Harvesting that otherwise lost resource and diverting it to storage secure from evaporation – ideally by using it to recharge groundwater – is an equally important but less-used strategy. Securing a sustainable water supply for all peoples is the most important objective that geoscientists can address.

In practice, to assure good quality water supplies to a community in the form of productive wells, surface water harvesting schemes or planning the recharge of exploited aquifers requires skill, a great deal of work and considerable financial resources. Yet in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa and arid areas of Asia knowing where to focus effort and increase the chances of it being fruitful is one the biggest hurdles to overcome. Such reconnaissance – highlighting the most probable localities on geological and hydrological grounds, and screening out those least likely to yield water for drinking and hygiene – depends on details of the geology and topography of the terrain in which needy communities are situated. For most of the Afro-Asian dryland belt adequate geological and topographic maps are in as short supply as potable water itself. Remote sensing combined with an understanding of groundwater storage and surface-water harvesting is a powerful tool for bridging that knowledge gap, and is routinely used successfully in areas blessed with abundances of experienced geoscientists, money and engineering infrastructure. Again, most of the Afro-Asian dryland belt is poorly endowed in these respects.

Having long ago written a textbook on general remote sensing for geoscientists, now out of print (Image Interpretation in Geology (3^rd edition): 2001. Nelson Thorne/Blackwell Science), I decided to re-issue revised parts of it framed in the specific context of water exploration in arid and semi-arid terrains, and to add practical case studies and exercises based on a free version of professional image processing and desktop mapping software. Some of the most geologically revealing remotely sensed image data – those from the Landsat series of satellites and the joint US-Japan ASTER system carried by Terra, one of NASA’a Earth Observing System satellites – are now easily and freely available for the whole of the Earth’s land surface. Given basic familiarity with theory and practicalities, a computer and appropriate software together with a moderately fast internet connection there is nothing to stop any geoscientist, university geology student or engineer working in the water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) sector from becoming a proficient, self-contained practitioner in water reconnaissance. Water Exploration: Remote Sensing Approaches has that aim. Online access to the theoretical parts is free, and a DVD that combines theory, software, exemplary data and several exercises that teach the use of image processing/desktop mapping software is available at cost of reproduction and postage.

If you visit the website, find what you see potentially useful and wish to know more, contact me through the Comments form at the H2Oexplore homepage.

China’s legendary great flood did happen

Published on August 24, 2016 by zooks777Leave a comment

The Biblical Flood is one of several legendary catastrophes that over the millennia have made their way into popular mythology. Indeed, Baron Georges Cuvier explained his stratigraphy of the Paris Basin and fossil evidence for extinctions of animals as the results of repeated inundations. His opinions and those of other scientists of the catastrophist school reflect the philosophical transition that began with the Enlightenment of the 18^th century: curiosity and observation set against medieval dogma. It seems that transition is incomplete as there are still people who seek remains of Noah’s Ark and propose alien beings as the constructors of the huge geoglyphs of the Nazka Desert in Peru. On the other hand, Walter Pitman – one of the pioneers of plate tectonics – and his colleague William Ryan sought a rational explanation for the Flood, based in part on a more detailed description of a flodd in the Near East in one of the oldest written documents, the Epic of Gilgamesh (~2150-1400 BCE). In 1996 they published a hypothesis that such flood legends may have arisen from oral accounts of the flooding of the previously cut-off Black Sea basin through the Bosphorus as global sea level rose about 7600 years ago.

Chinese mythology too contains graphic descriptions of catastrophic flooding in the legend of Emperor Yu, first written down at the start of the first millennium BCE. Rather than being a victim or a survivor of catastrophe, Yu is credited with relieving the aftermath of the supposed flood by instigating ingenious systems of dredging and rechanneling the responsible river, and instigating the start of Chinese civilisation and the Xia Dynasty. Such detail conveys a greater air of veracity than a substantial boat containing male and female representatives of all animal species ending up on top of a mountain once Flood waters subsided! Recent research by Quinglong Wu of the School of Archeology at Peking University, together with other Chinese and US colleagues along the Yellow River has nailed the truth of the legend to events in the headwaters of the Yellow River (Wu, Q. and 15 others 2016. Outburst flood at 1920 BCE supports historicity of China’s Great Flood and the Xia dynasty. Science, v. 353, p. 579-582).

The team discovered evidence for a huge landslide in a terrace of the Yellow River where it flows through the Jishi Gorge. Probably dislodged by an earthquake, the slide blocked the gorge so that a large lake formed above it. The lake also left sedimentary evidence on the flanks of the gorge, which suggest that it may have been as much as 200 m deep and impounded 12 to 17 km³ of water. Downstream of the gorge sediments of the Guanting Basin contain chaotic sediments characteristic of outburst floods, probably deposited once the landslide dam was breached. ¹⁴C dates of charcoal from the outburst flood sediments give a likely age for the massive event of 1922±28 BCE. Astonishingly, remains of three children from a cave near the Yellow River are buried in the flood deposits and provided an age within error of that of the flood: they were victims. Sediments extending to the coast in the North China Plain are the repositories of much of the archaeological evidence for the evolution of Chinese culture along with signs of rates of sedimentation. The definite signs of a catastrophic flood upstream coincides with the transition from Neolithic to Bronze Age artefacts in the Yellow River flood plain.

Earthquakes in Nepal

Published on January 19, 2016 by zooks777Leave a comment

The magnitude 7.8 Gorkha earthquake hit much of the Himalayan state of Nepal on 25 April 2015, to be followed by one of magnitude 7.3 150 km to the east 18 days later. As would have happened in any high-relief area both events triggered a huge number of landslides as well as toppling buildings, killing almost 9000 people and leaving 22 000 injured in the capital Kathmandu and about 30 rural administrative districts. Relief and reconstruction remain hindered 9 months on in many of the smaller villages because they are accessible only by footpaths. Nepal had remained free of devastating earthquakes for almost 6 centuries, highlighting the perils of long quiescence in active plate-boundary areas.

Damage in Kathmandu, Nepal, after the Gorkha earthquake in May 2015 (Credit: CNN)

The International Charter: Space and Major Disasters consortium of many national space agencies was activated, resulting in one of the largest ever volumes of satellite images ranging from 30 to 1 m resolution to be captured and made freely available for relief direction, analysis and documentation. This allowed more than 7500 volunteers to engage in ‘crowd mapping’ coordinated by the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) to provide logistic support to the Nepal government, UN Agencies and other international organizations who were swiftly responding with humanitarian relief. Most important was the location of damaged areas using ‘before-after’ analysis and assessing possible routes to remote areas. The US NASA and British Geological Survey with Durham University coordinated a multinational effort by geoscientists to document the geological, geophysical and geomorphological factors behind the mass movement of debris in landslides etc that was triggered by the earthquakes, results from which have just appeared (Kargel, J.S. and 63 others 2016. Geomorphic and geological controls of geohazards induced by Nepal’s 2015 Gorkha earthquake. Science, v. 351, p. 140 – full text purchase).

The large team mapped 4312 new landslides and inspected almost 500 glacial lakes for damage, only 9 had visible damage but none of them showing signs of outbursts. As any civil engineer might have predicted, landslides were concentrated in areas with slopes exceeding 30° coincided with high ground acceleration due to the shaking effect of earthquakes. Ground acceleration can only be assessed from the actual seismogram records of the earthquakes, though slope angle is easily mapped using existing digital elevation data (e.g. SRTM). It should be possible to model landslide susceptibility to some extent over large areas by simulation of ground shaking based on various combinations of seismic magnitude and epicenter depth modulated by maps of bedrock and colluvium on valley sides as well as from after-the-event surveys. The main control over distribution of landslides seems to have been the actual fault mechanism involved in the earthquake, assessed from satellite radar interferometry, with the greatest number and density being on the downthrow side (up to 0.82 m surface drop): the uplifted area (up to 1.13 m) had barely any debris movements. Damage lies above deep zones where brittle deformation probably takes place leading to sudden discrete faults, but is less widespread above deep zones of plastic deformation.

The geoscientific information gleaned from the Gorkha earthquake’s effects will no doubt help in assessing risky areas elsewhere in the Himalayan region. Yet so too will steady lithological and structural mapping of this still poorly understood and largely remote area. As regards the number of lives saved, one has to bear in mind that few people buried by landslides and collapsed buildings survive longer than a few days. It seems that rapid response by geospatial data analysts to the logistics of relief and escape has more chance of positive humanitarian outcomes.

In the same issue of Science appears another article on Nepalese seismicity, but events of the 12^th to 14^th centuries CE (Schwanghart, W. and 10 others 2016. Repeated catastrophic valley infill following medieval earthquakes in the Nepal Himalaya. Science, v. 351, p. 147-150). As the title suggests, this relates to recent geology beneath a valley floor in which Nepal’s second city Pokhara is located. It lies immediately to the south of the 8000 m Annapurna massif, about 50 km west of the Gorkha epicentre. Sections through the upper valley sediments reveal successive debris accumulations on scales that dwarf those moved in the 2015 landslides. Dating (¹⁴C) of interlayered organic materials match three recorded earthquakes in 1100, 1255 and 1344 CE, each estimated to have been of magnitude 8 or above. The debris is dominated by carbonate rocks that probably came from the Annapurna massif some 60 km distant. They contain evidence of extreme pulverisation and occur in a series of interbeds some fine others dominated by clasts. The likelihood is that these are evidence of mass movement of a more extreme category than landslides and rockfalls: catastrophic debris flows or rock-ice avalanches involving, in total, 4 to 5 km³ of material.

Seismic menace of the Sumatra plate boundary

Published on November 19, 2015 by zooks777Leave a comment

More than a decade after the 26 December 2004 Great Aceh Earthquake and the Indian Ocean tsunamis that devastating experience and four more lesser seismic events (> 7.8 Magnitude) have show a stepwise shift in activity to the SE along the Sumatran plate boundary. It seems that stresses along the huge thrust system associated with subduction of the Indo-Australian Plate that had built up over 200 years of little seismicity are becoming unlocked from sector to sector along the Sumatran coast. Areas further to the SE are therefore at risk from both major earthquakes and tsunamis. A seismic warning system now operates in the Indian Ocean, but the effectiveness of communications to potential victims has been questioned since its installation. However, increasing sophistication of geophysical data and modelling allows likely zones at high risk to be assessed.

Recent Great Earthquakes in different segments of the Sumatra plate margin (credit: Tectonics Observatory, California Institute of Technology http://www.tectonics.caltech.edu/outreach/highlights/sumatra/why.html

One segment is known to have experienced giant earthquakes in 1797 and 1833 but none since then. What is known as the Mentawai seismic gap lies between two other segments in which large earthquakes have occurred in the 21^st century: it is feared that gap will eventually be filled by another devastating event. Geophysicists from the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris and Nanyang Technological University in Singapore have published a high-resolution seismic reflection survey showing the subduction zone beneath the Mentawai seismic gap (Kuncoro, A.K. et al. 2015. Tsunamigenic potential due to frontal rupturing in the Sumatra locked zone. Earth and Planetary Science Letters, v. 432, p. 311-322). It shows that that the upper part of the zone, the accretionary wedge, is laced with small thrust-bounded ‘pop-ups’. The base of the accretionary wedge shows a series of small seaward thrusts above the subduction surface itself forming ‘piggyback’ or duplex structures.

Seismic reflection profile across part of the Sumatra plate boundary, showing structures produced by past seismicity. (credit: Kuncoro et al. 2015, Figure 3b)

The authors model the mechanisms that probably produced these intricate structures. This shows that the inactive parts of the plate margin have probably locked in stresses equivalent to of the order of 10 m of horizontal displacement formed by the average 5 to 6 cm of annual subduction of the Indo-Australian Plate over the two centuries since the last major earthquakes. Reactivation of the local structures by release of this strain would distribute it by horizontal movements of between 5.5 to 9.2 m and related 2 to 6.6 m vertical displacement in the pop-ups. That may suddenly push up the seafloor substantially during a major earthquake, thereby producing tsunamis. Whether or not this is a special feature of the Sumatra plate boundary that makes it unusually prone to tsunami production is not certain: such highly resolving seismic profiles need to be conducted over all major subduction zones to resolve that issue. What does emerge from the study is that a repeat of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunamis is a distinct possibility, sooner rather than later.

Tsunami and Risk: How Much We Know Now

Roman concrete restrains magma

Published on August 17, 2015 by zooks777Leave a comment

Four million people in and around the Italian city of Naples on the shore of the Tyrrhenian Sea have always lived under a double threat of natural disaster. The one that immediately springs to most people’s mind is the huge volcano Vesuvius that looms over its eastern suburbs, for this was the source of the incandescent pyroclastic flow that overwhelmed Pompeii and Herculaneum in 79 CE. Less familiar outside Italy is a cluster of elliptical volcanic features directly to the west of the city: Campi Flegrei or the Phlegraean Fields. In fact the cluster is part of a vast, dormant caldera, half of which lies beneath the sea centred on the ancient Roman port of Puteoli (modern Pozzuoli). This volcanic collapse structure is about 10 km across; about as large as Vesuvius. Campi Flegrei is famous for its sulfur-rich fumaroles including the mythical crater home of Vulcan the god of fire, Solfatara.

The Bay of Naples with Vesuvius to the east of the city and Campi Flegrei to the west. (credit: Google Earth)

Between 1970 and 1984 the ground around Pozzuoli rose more than 2 metres, which may be evidence that the deep seated magma chamber is inflating. Fears that this might presage an eruption in the near future stems from a curious feature affecting archaeological remains, such as upright pillars in the harbour area of Pozzuoli. At many different levels the stonework is pockmarked by curious holes that are the fossil borings of marine molluscs: at some stage the feet of the pillars descended below sea level. Together with historic records since the Roman era these borings help to establish the local ups and downs of the surface over the last two millennia in considerable detail. From a high of 4 m above sea level when the pillars were erected 194 BCE they slowly subsided to reach sea level around 300 CE when Puteoli ceased to be an important harbour and 4 metres below that around 900 CE. For the last millennium they have slowly risen until in 1538 more than 4 metres of inflation took place very rapidly. That was immediately followed by a small eruption of about 0.02 km³ of magma at Mount Nuovo, to the northeast of another recent crater now occupied by a lake: hence the fear surrounding the uplift in 1970-84. Campi Flegrei has a history of eruptions going back 40 thousand years, including two in the ‘super volcano’ category of 200 and 40 km³ that blanketed vast areas in pyroclastic ash.

One tantalising aspect of the ground inflation and deflation is that each cycle lasts of the order of a thousand years. Another seems to be that magma breaks to the surface very rapidly after a long period of inflation, as if whatever was keeping the magma chamber in a metastable state failed in a brittle fashion. Tiziana Vanorio and Waruntorn Kanitpanyacharoen of Stanford and Chulalonkorn universities in the US and Thailand have come up with a possible reason for such gradual crustal warping in volcanic areas and long-delayed eruption, for which Campi Flegrei is a model case (in fact the oscillations there are unsurpassed). Such long-term bending of the crust suggests abnormally strong rock near the surface. The co-workers analysed borehole cores that penetrated to the depth of small shallow earthquakes – in the metamorphic basement of the area – and found that the zone above the seismically active layer is not only stronger than the basement, but closely resembles a construction material to which Roman architecture owes its longevity (Vanorio, T. & Kanitpanyacharoen, W. 2015. Rock physics of fibrous rocks akin to Roman concrete explains uplifts at Campi Flegrei Caldera. Science, v. 349, p. 617-621).

Roman masons discovered that by mixing young, loose volcanic ash with lime mortar (calcium hydroxide) produced a strong concrete when cured. Specifically, the invention of concrete took place at Pozzuoli itself, using volcanic ash from Campi Flegrei and the product was known as pozzolana. Young ash from an explosive volcano is mainly shards of anhydrous silicate glass, which quickly react with water and calcium hydroxide to produce fibres of hydrous calc-silicate minerals, almost as in conventional cement curing, but without the need for heating limestone and clay to very high temperatures. The strength of pozzolano enabled Roman architects to build the great dome of the Pantheon in Rome, still the world’s largest unreinforced concrete dome. Moreover, the speed with which it sets by exothermic reactions enables its use below sea level. Vanorio and Kanitpanyacharoen found that the strong upper zone beneath Campi Flegrei is almost identical to pozzolano, and suggest that it formed as a result of calcium-rich hydrothermal fluids percolating through young pyroclastic rocks. The calcium derives from metamorphic basement rich in calc-silicate layers through which hot groundwater is driven as a result of heat from the underlying magma chamber. It seems the Campi Flegrei caldera has built its own containing dome. But that is perhaps a mixed blessing: the 1970-84 inflation seems now to be deflating and the flexible carapace may make using ground movements as means of predicting eruptions unreliable.

Intérieur du panteon à Rome — Interior view of the dome of the Pantheon in Rome (credit: Wikipedia)

Is Secret to Roman Concrete in Volcanic Rock?

Are coral islands doomed by global warming?

Published on June 18, 2015 by zooks777Leave a comment

Among the most voluble and persistent advocates of CO₂ emissions reduction are representatives of islands in the tropics that are built entirely of reef coral. All the habitable land on them reaches only a few metres above high-tide level, so naturally they have more cause to worry about global warming and sea-level rise than most of us. Towns and villages on some atolls do seem to be more regularly inundated than they once were. So a group of scientists from New Zealand and Australia set out to check if there have been losses of land on one Pacific atoll, Funafuti, during the century since tidal observatories first recorded an average 1.7 mm annual rise in global sea level and a faster rate (~3 mm a^-1) since 1993 (Kench, P.S. et al. 2015. Coral islands defy sea-level rise over the past century: Records from a central Pacific atoll. Geology, v. 43, p.515-518).

English: Funafuti (Tuvalu) from space Magyar: ... — Funafuti atoll (Tuvalu) from space (credit: Wikipedia)

Funafuti atoll comprises 32 islands that make up its rim, with a range of sizes, elevations, sediment build-ups and human modifications. The atoll was first accurately surveyed at the end of the 19^th century, has aerial photographic cover from 1943, 1971 and 1984 and high-resolution satellite image coverage from 2005 and 2014, so this is adequate to check whether or not sea-level rise has affected the available area and shape of the habitable zone. It appears that there has been no increase in erosion over the 20^th century and rather than any loss of land there has been a net gain of over 7%. The team concludes that coral reefs and islands derived from their remains and debris are able to adjust their size, shape and position to keep pace with sea level and with the effects of storms.

This is an observation of just one small community in the vastness of the Pacific Ocean, so is unlikely to reassure islanders elsewhere who live very close to sea level and are anxious. It is a finding that bears out longer-term evidence that atolls remained stable during the major sea-level changes of the post-glacial period until about 7 thousand years ago when land glaciers stabilised. Since coral grows at a surprisingly rapid rate, that growth and the local redistribution of debris released by wave action keep pace with sea-level change; at least that taking place at rates up to 3 mm per year. But the study leaves out another threat from global warming. Corals everywhere are starting to show signs of ill thrift, partly resulting from increasing acidity of seawater as more CO₂ dissolved in it and partly from increases in sea-surface temperature, as well a host of other implicated factors. This manifests itself in a phenomenon known as coral bleaching that may presage die-off. Should coral productivity decrease in the Pacific island states then the material balance shifts to land loss and sea level will begin an irresistible threat.

Small atoll islands may grow, not sink, as sea levels rise

Earthquake hazard news

Published on May 10, 2015 by zooks777Leave a comment

Assessments of seismic risk have relied until recently on records of destructive earthquakes going back centuries and their relationship to tectonic features, mainly active faults. They usually predict up to 50 years ahead. The US Geological Survey has now shifted focus to very recent records mainly of small to medium tremors, some of which have appeared in what are tectonically stable areas as well as the background seismicity in tectonically restless regions. This enables the short-term risk (around one year) to be examined. To the scientists’ surprise, the new modelling completely changes regional maps of seismic risk. The probabilities in the short-term of potentially dangerous ground movements in 17 oil- and gas-rich areas rival those in areas threatened by continual, tectonic jostling, such as California. The new ‘hot spots’ relate to industrial activity, primarily the disposal of wastewater from petroleum operations by pumping it into deep aquifers.

USGS map highlighting short-term earthquake risk zones. Blue boxes indicate areas with induced earthquakes (source: US Geological Survey)

Fluid injection increases hydrostatic pressure in aquifers and also in the spaces associated with once inactive fault and fracture systems. All parts of the crust are stressed to some extent but the presence of fluids and over-pressuring increases the tendency for rock failure. While anti-fracking campaigners have focussed partly on seismic risk – fracking has caused tremors around magnitudes 2 to 3 – the process is a rapid one-off injection involving small fluid volumes compared with petroleum waste-water disposal. All petroleum production carries water as well as oil and gas to wellheads. Coming from great depth it is formation water held in pores since sedimentary deposition, which is environmentally damaging because of its high content of dissolved salts and elevated temperature. Environmental protection demands that disposal must return it to depth.

The main worry is that waste water disposal might trigger movements with magnitudes up to 7.0: in 2011 a magnitude 5.6 earthquake hit a town in oil-producing Oklahoma and damaged many buildings. Currently, US building regulations rely on earthquake risk maps that consider a 50-year timescale, but they take little account of industrially induced seismicity. So the new data is likely to cause quite a stir. These are changing times, however, as the oil price fluctuates wildly. So production may well shift from field to field seeking sustainable rates of profit, and induced seismicity may well change as a result.

None of these areas are likely to experience the horrors of the 25 April 2015 magnitude 7.8 earthquake in Nepal. However, it also occurred in an area expected to be relatively stable compared with the rest of the Himalayan region. The only previous major tremor there was recorded in the 14^th century. This supposedly ‘low-risk’ area overlies a zone in which small tremors or microearthquakes occur all the time. Such zones – and this one extends along much of the length of the Himalaya – seem to mark where fault depths are large enough for displacements to take place continually by plastic flow, thereby relieving stresses. Most of the large earthquakes have taken place south of the microseismic zone where the shallow parts of the Indian plate are brittle and have become locked. The recent event is raising concerns that it is a precursor of further large earthquakes in Nepal. Its capital Kathmandu is especially susceptible as it is partly founded on lake sediments that easily liquefy.

Note added: 13 May 2015. Nepal suffered another major shock (magnitude 7.3) on 12 May in the vicinity of Mount Everest. It too seems to have occurred in the zone of microearthquakes formerly thought to mark a zone where the crust fails continually bu plastic deformation thereby relieving stresses. Kathmandu was this time at the edge of the shake zone

A tsunami and NW European Mesolithic settlements

Published on March 3, 2015 by zooks777Leave a comment

About 8.2 ka ago sediments on the steep continental edge of the North and Norwegian Seas slid onto the abyssal plain of the North Atlantic. This huge mass displacement triggered a tsunami whose effects manifest themselves in sand inundations at the heads of inlets and fjords along the Norwegian and eastern Scottish coasts that reach up to 10 m above current sea level. At that time actual sea level was probably 10 m lower than at present as active melting of the last glacial ice sheets was still underway: the waves may have reached 20-30 m above the 8.2 ka sea level. So powerful were the tsunami waves in the constricted North Sea that they may have separated the British Isles from the European mainland by inundating Doggerland, the low-lying riverine plain that joined them before global sea level rose above their elevation at around the same time. Fishing vessels plying the sandbanks of the southern North Sea often trawl-up well preserved remains of land mammals and even human tools: almost certainly Doggerland was prime hunting territory during the Mesolithic, as well as an easily traversed link to the then British Peninsula. Mesolithic settlements close by tsunami deposits are known from Inverness in Scotland and Dysvikja north of Bergen in Norway and individual Mesolithic dwellings occur on the Northumberland coast. The tsunami must have had some effect on Mesolithic hunter gatherers who had migrated into a game-rich habitat. The question is: How devastating was it.

Hunter gatherers move seasonally with favoured game species, often returning to semi-permanent settlements for the least fruitful late-autumn to early spring season. The dominant prey animals, red deer and reindeer also tend to migrate to the hills in summer, partly to escape blood-feeding insects, returning to warmer, lower elevations for the winter. If that movement pattern dominated Mesolithic populations then the effects of the tsunami would have been most destructive in late-autumn to early spring. During warmer seasons, people may not even have noticed its effects although coastal habitations and boats may have been destroyed.

Norwegian scientists Knut Rydgren and Stein Bondevik from Sogn og Fjordane University College, Sognda devised a clever means of working out the tsunami’s timing from mosses preserved in the sand inundations that added to near-shore marine sediments. (Rydgren, K. & Bondevik, S. 2015. Most growth patterns and timing of human exposure to a Mesolithic tsunami in the North Atlantic. Geology, v. 43, p. 111-114). Well-preserved stems of stair-step moss Hylocomium splendens still containing green chlorophyll occur, along with ripped up fragments of peat and soil, near the top of the tsunami deposit which has been uplifted by post-glacial isostatic uplift to form a bog. This moss grows shoots annually, the main growth spurt being at the end of the summer-early autumn growing season. Nineteen preserved samples preserved such new shoots that were as long as or longer than the preceding year’s shoots. This suggests that they were torn up by the tsunami while still alive towards the end of the growing season, around late-October. All around the North Sea Mesolithic people could have been returning from warm season hunting trips to sea-shore winter camps, only to have their dwellings, boats and food stores devastated, if indeed they survived such a terrifying event.

Judging earthquake risk

Published on December 30, 2014 by zooks7773 Comments

The early 21^st century seems to have been plagued by very powerful earthquakes: 217 greater than Magnitude 7.0; 19 > Magnitude 8.0 and 2 >Magnitude 9.0. Although some lesser seismic events kill, those above M 7.0 have a far greater potential for fatal consequences. Over 700 thousand people have died from their effects: ~20 000 in the 2001 Gujarat earthquake (M 7.7); ~29 000 in 2003 Bam earthquake (M 6.6); ~250 000 in the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that stemmed from a M 9.1 earthquake off western Sumatra; ~95 000 in the 2005 Kashmir earthquake (M7.6); ~87 000 in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake (M 7.9); up to 316 000 in the 2010 Haiti earthquake (M 7.0); ~20 000 in the 2011 tsunami that hit NE Japan from the M 9.0 Tohoku earthquake. The 26 December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunamis spelled out the far-reaching risk to populated coastal areas that face oceans prone to seismicity or large coastal landslips, but also the need for warning systems: tsunamis travel far more slowly than seismic waves and , except for directly adjacent areas, there is good chance of escape given a timely alert. Yet, historically http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/world/most_destructive.php, deadly risk is most often posed by earthquakes that occur beneath densely populated continental crust. Note that the most publicised earthquake that hit San Francisco in 1906 (at M 7.8) that lies on the world’s best-known fault, the San Andreas, caused between 700 and 3000 fatalities, a sizable proportion of which resulted from the subsequent fire. For continental earthquakes the biggest factor in deadly risk, outside of population density, is that of building standards.

It barely needs stating that earthquakes are due to movement on faults, and these can leave distinct signs at or near to the surface, such as scarps, offsets of linear features such as roads, and broad rises or falls in the land surface. However, if they are due to faulting that does not break the surface – so-called ‘blind’ faults – very little record is left for geologists to analyse. But if it is possible to see actual breaks and shifts exposed by shallow excavations through geologically young materials, as in road cuts or trenches, then it is possible to work out an actual history of movements and their dimensions. It has also become increasingly possible to date the movements precisely using radiometric or luminescence means: a key element in establishing seismic risk is the historic frequency of events on active faults. Some of the most dangerous active faults are those at mountain fronts, such as the Himalaya and the American cordilleras, which often take the form of surface-breaking thrusts that are relative easy to analyse, although little work has been done to date. A notable study is on the West Andean Thrust that breaks cover east of Chile’s capital Santiago with a population of around 6 million (Vargas, G. Et al. 2014. Probing large intraplate earthquakes at the west flank of the Andes. Geology, v. 42, p. 1083-1086). This fault forms a prominent series of scarps in Santiago’s eastern suburbs, but for most of its length along the Andean Front it is ‘blind’. The last highly destructive on-shore earthquake in western South America was due to thrust movement that devastated the western Argentinean city of Mendoza in 1861. But the potential for large intraplate earthquakes is high along the entire west flank of the Andes.

Vargas and colleagues from France and the US excavated a 5 m deep trench through alluvium and colluvium over a distance of 25 m across one of the scarps associated with the San Ramon Thrust. They found excellent evidence of metre-sized displacement of some prominent units within the young sediments, sufficient to detect the effects of two distinct, major earthquakes, each producing horizontal shifts of up to 5 m. Individual sediment strata were dateable using radiocarbon and optically stimulated luminescence techniques. The earlier displacement occurred at around 17-19 ka and the second at about 8 ka. Various methods of estimation of the likely earthquake magnitudes of the displacements yielded values of about M 7.2 to 7.5 for both. That is quite sufficient for devastation of now nearby Santiago and, worryingly, another movement may be likely in the foreseeable future.

A supervolcano’s plumbing system

Published on November 11, 2014 by zooks777Leave a comment

What was the most devastating natural disaster ever to face humans? It would be tempting to suggest the Indian Ocean tsunami of 26 December 2004, but that is because most people remember it with horror. In fact the worst the Earth ever flung at us was much further back in our history and left a huge spike of sulfates in the Greenland icecap at around 73 thousand years ago. This relic of volcanic aerosols that had blasted into the stratosphere was tracked back to a 100 by 30 km caldera in Sumatra now occupied by a lake (Lake Toba) that is 500 m deep in places and almost filled by a slightly off-centre island. The eruption explosively ejected 2800 cubic kilometres of magma, of which an estimated 800 km³ fell as ash across a wide swath of the tropics westwards of Sumatra at least as far as Arabia and East Africa; the line of march taken by anatomically modern humans migrating from Africa. In India and Malaysia the Toba ash layer reaches 5-10 m thickness and probably occurs undetected as a thin layer across the entire tropics. Around 10¹⁰ tonnes of sulfuric acid belched out, some to enter and linger in the stratosphere, which is estimated to have caused an average decrease in average global temperatures of 3.0 to 3.5 °C for several years. Studies of human mtDNA hint at a genetic bottleneck around the time of Toba’s eruption and a large decrease, perhaps as much as 60%, in the global population of Homo sapiens. But humans survived or quickly filled devastated land in India, where stone tools are found both below and just above the Toba ash layer.

The largest volcanic eruption in the last 26 Ma, there can be little doubt that no other natural catastrophe had as large an influence on humanity as did Toba. Of course, slower processes such as climate change and ups and downs of sea level lay behind the repeated spread of humans out of Africa and probably their evolution as a whole. The drama of the Toba event has drawn attention to the massive risk posed by supervolcanoes in general, such as that centred on Yellowstone in the NW US, which show signs of activity 640 ka after its last major explosive event. Toba certainly is not dead, for its peculiar island of Samosir has been uplifted steadily since the eruption by about 450 m, probably due to influx of magma deep beneath the surface, and experiences shallow earthquakes. What lies in the guts of supervolcanoes is literally a hot topic and a new 3-D imaging method has been applied to Toba.

Seismic tomography that uses background or ambient seismic noise has become a powerful technique for studying the crust and lithosphere when small-amplitude short-wavelength Rayleigh and Love surface waves are monitored to pick up subsurface reflecting bodies and measure variation in wave speed with depth. The greater the density of seismometers deployed, the finer the resolution of deep crustal features and 40 such detectors are in place around Lake Toba. A team of Russian, French and German geophysicists have reported new results bearing on how magma may be accumulating beneath the vast caldera (Jaxibulatov, K. et al. 2014. A large magmatic sill complex beneath the Toba caldera. Science, v. 346, p. 617-619). Down to about 7 km the tomography has picked up a structurally homogeneous low-speed zone directly beneath Samosir Island that the authors attribute to the 73 ka explosive eruption. Beneath that several magma sills appear to dominate the sub-caldera crust, possibly responsible for the post eruption uplift within the caldera: the precursor to a layered intrusive body and each an increment towards a further huge eruption.

Interpretation of seismic tomography cross section of Toba. Greens to reds increasingly negative shear speed anomaly. Showing magma sills in lower crust and 74 ka damage zone above 7 km. (credit: Jaxibulatov et al. 2014

September’s picture: Iceland eruption

Published on September 29, 2014 by zooks777Leave a comment

This month’s stunning image from Earth Science Picture of the Day, taken on 8 September this year is of Iceland’s biggest fissure eruption (video clip) since 1875, in the Holuhraun lava field, which began on 31 August this year. The flow is about to meet the Jokulsa a Fjollum, a large river flowing from Iceland’s largest ice cap Vatnajokull. At the time of writing (29 September) lava is flowing along the river bed at around 1 km each day. So far, the flow has spread over 44 square kilometres, and risks blocking the Jokulsa a Fjollum where it flows through a narrow channel bounded by older lava flows. If that happens the river will form a substantial lake until it is able to flow over and erode the bedrock, and will also leave one of the country’s spectacular waterfalls (Sellfoss) dry.

The fissure is connected to the large Bárðarbunga stratovolcano that lies beneath Vatnajokull, which is currently showing signs of subsidence, at about 40 cm each day, and seismicity. There are concerns that this activity may presage an eruption there which may melt large volumes of ice and perhaps release a flood or jökulhlaup from beneath the icecap. Such a flood would likely follow the course of the Jokulsa a Fjollum river.

Serious groundwater depletion in western US

Published on August 15, 2014 by zooks777Leave a comment

The 2300 km long Colorado River whose catchment covers most of Arizona and parts of the states of Colorado, California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico and Wyoming is one of the world’s most harvested surface water resources. So much so that barely a trickle now ends up in Baja California where the huge river once flowed into the sea. The lower reaches of the river system cross arid lands and it is the water source for several major cities and areas of intensive agriculture, serving as many as 40 million people and 16 thousand km² of irrigated fields. It has been nicknamed the US Nile because of its economic importance, but Egypt’s Nile has far less pressure put on it, although its exit flow to the Mediterranean is also hugely reduced from its former peak volume. The water crisis affecting the Colorado River and the areas that it serves has peaked during the 14-year drought over its lower reaches. To ease conditions in the former wet lands of Mexico near the river’s outlet 2014 saw deliberate major releases from giant reservoirs higher in the Colorado’s course.

English: New map of the Colorado River watersh... — The Colorado River Basin (credit: Wikipedia)

Surface abstraction is not the only drain on water resources of the Colorado River basin: groundwater pumping from the sediments beneath has grown enormously for both irrigation and urban use. That it is possible to play golf at many courses in the desert and to see monstrous musical fountains in Las Vegas is down largely to groundwater exploitation. There have been concerns about depletion of underground reserves once abstraction outpaced natural recharge by infiltration of rainfall and snow melt, but highlighting the magnitude of the problem required a rather dramatic discovery: so much water has been lost from aquifers that the missing mass has reduced the Earth’s gravitational field over the south-west US (Castle, S.L. et al. 2014. Groundwater depletion during drought threatens future water security of the Colorado River Basin. Geophysical Research Letters, doi: 10.1002/2014GL061055).

The evidence comes from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE), jointly funded by NASA and Germany’s DLR and launched in March 2002. GRACE uses two satellites that follow the same orbit with a spacing of 220 km between them. Range finders on each measure their separation distance, and so their ups and downs as gravity varies, with far greater accuracy than any other method. Measuring the Earth’s entire gravitational field at their orbital height takes about a month. Groundwater depletion beneath the Gangetic Plains of northern India, to the tune of 109 km³, was detected in 2009 and the same approach has been applied to the Colorado Basin for nine years between 2004 and 2013. It shows that during this part of one of the longest droughts in the history of the south-west US 50 km³ have been lost from beneath, as a rate of about 5.5 km³ per year. Though the total is half the loss from beneath northern India, it should be remembered that more than ten times as many people depend on the Ganges Basin. Moreover, there is no monsoon recharge in the south-western states.

How the great Tohoku-Sendai earthquake and tsunami happened

Published on December 30, 2013 by zooks777Leave a comment

The great Tohoku earthquake (moment magnitude 9.0) of 11 March 2011 beneath the Pacific Ocean off the largest Japanese island of Honshu resulted in the devastating tsunami that tore many kilometres inland along its northern coast line and affected the entire Pacific Basin (see NOAA animation of the tsunami’s propagation) .

English: Sendai Rinkai Railway locomotive(SD55... — Railway locomotive thrown aside by the 11 March 2011 Tsunami in Japan. (credit: Wikipedia)

This article can now be read in full at Earth-logs in the Geohazards archive for 2017

Estimating arsenic risks in China

Published on September 4, 2013 by zooks7772 Comments

Two weeks after Earth pages featured arsenic in groundwater below the Mekong Delta another important paper has emerged about modelling risk of arsenic contamination throughout the People’s Republic of China (Rodriguez-Lado, L. et al. 2013. Groundwater arsenic contamination throughout China. Science, v. 341, p. 866-868). Scientists based in the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and technology and the China Medical University follow up the results of geochemical testing of groundwater from almost 450 thousand wells in 12% of China’s counties; part of a nationwide aim to test millions of wells. That is a programme likely to last for decades, and their work seeks to develop a predictive model that might better focus such an enormous effort and help in other large regions where well sampling is not so advanced.

As well as the well-known release of arsenic-containing ions through the dissolution of iron oxy-hydroxides in aquifers that exhibit reducing conditions, aridity that causes surface evaporation can create alkaline conditions in groundwater that also desorbs arsenic from similar minerals. The early results from China suggested 16 environmental factors available in digital map form, mainly geological, topographic and hydrogeochemical, that possibly encourage contamination; a clear indication of the sheer complexity of the problem. Using GIS techniques these possible proxies were narrowed down to 8 that show significant correlation with arsenic levels above the WHO suggested maximum tolerable concentration of 10 micrograms per litre (10 parts per billion by volume). Geology (Holocene sediments are most likely sources), the texture of soils and their salinity, the potential wetness of soils predicted from topography and the density of surface streams carrying arsenic correlate positively with high well-water contamination, whereas slope, distance from streams and gravity (a measure of depth of sedimentary basins) show a negative correlation. These parameters form the basis for the predictive model and more than 2500 new arsenic measurements were used to validate the results of the analysis.

Estimated probability of arsenic in Chinese groundwater above the WHO acceptable maximum concentration (Credit:Rodriguez-Lado, et al. 2013)

The results graphically highlight possible high risk areas, mainly in the northern Chinese provinces that are partly confirmed by the validation. Using estimated variations in population density across the country the team discovered that as many as 19.6 million people may be affected by consumption of arsenic contaminated water. In fact if groundwater is used for irrigation, arsenic may also be ingested with locally grown food. It seems that the vast majority of Chinese people live outside the areas of risk, so that mitigating risk is likely to be more manageable that it is in Bangladesh and West Bengal.

As well as being an important input to environmental health management in the PRC the approach is appropriate for other large areas where direct water monitoring is less organised, such as Mongolia, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan in central Asia, and in the arid regions of South America.

New risk model sheds light on arsenic risk in China’s groundwater (phys.org)
New predictive method pinpoints arsenic hotspots (terradaily.com)
Risk Management: Building a Model That Can Predict Arsenic Contamination Of Drinking Wells In China (medicaldaily.com)

Yet another risk of arsenic exposure

Published on August 15, 2013 by zooks7771 Comment

The most widely feared risk of poisoning through natural causes, which grossly disfigures and kills through a range of cancers, is from chronic exposure to arsenic in drinking water. Tragically, the risk is highest from what has traditionally been considered safest source, groundwater. That was the gruesome lesson of a massive transfer in Bangladesh from drinking surface water containing organic pathogens to reliance on well waters. The greatest mass poisoning in history was eventually traced to shallow aquifers in the Ganges-Brahmaputra plains that were rich in organic matter. Their reducing chemistry broke down iron hydroxide coatings on sedimentary grains. Since these minerals are among the most accommodating adsorbers of ions from the environment, including a variety of arsenic-bearing ions, their dissolution releases potential poisons from otherwise safe storage. In Bangladesh and neighbouring West Bengal in India it was found that deeper aquifers have oxidising chemistry and so the iron minerals not only hold ionic pollutants fast by adsorption but help to extract them from groundwater. Deep wells together with various kinds of treatment of shallow groundwater, some using the very iron minerals whose breakdown caused the pollution, are helping to mitigate the perilous situation for people of South Asia.

Skin lesions from arsenic poisoning in Bangladesh — Skin lesions (keratoses) from arsenic poisoning in Bangladesh (Photo credit: waterdotorg)

Much the same kind of arsenic pollution has subsequently been revealed in groundwaters of lowland Vietnam and Cambodia. Yet the turn there to deep groundwater has revealed a new twist. That too is yielding increasingly high arsenic concentrations, but for a different reason (Erband, L.E. et al. 2013. Release of arsenic to deep groundwater in the Mekong Delta, Vietnam, linked to pumping-induced land subsidence. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, doi/10.1073/pnas.1300503110). Scientists from Stanford University, California analysed waters from around 900 wells in the Lower Mekong Delta and found several tracts with arsenic contents well above levels deemed safe by the WHO. Some, as could be anticipated from South Asian studies, were from shallow wells along the present course of the Mekong. However, in the delta area to the southwest of Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) is a large cluster from wells 150 to 450 m deep, totally unlike the situation in other areas of thick Pliocene to Recent river sedimentation.

Comparing the distribution of affected wells with precise estimates of the subsidence rates of the land surface from orbital interferometric radar surveys shows a close correlation of arsenic contamination with rates of subsidence. This suggests that groundwater pumping from deep aquifers is causing compaction at depth, in much the same way as in the environs of Venice. But is this somehow drawing in arsenic polluted water from higher levels? It seems not. So the pollution seems most likely to be an effect of pumping itself. The authors suggest that most of the subsidence is due to compaction of clay-rich sediments rather than the sandy aquifers, well known by engineers to resist compression. They explain the increasing arsenic concentrations by the introduction into the aquifers of water expelled from the clays, either containing arsenic ions in solution or carrying organic compounds that create the reducing conditions to break down iron hydroxide grain coatings and release ions adsorbed on their surfaces.

This presents another grim prospect for South Asian people forced to make the choice between drinking polluted surface water and enteric disease and increasingly exploited deep groundwaters that seem to be safe as well as in very high volumes. Let’s hope that arsenic monitoring can be maintained in the Ganges-Brahmaputra plains in the long term.

Scientists find new arsenic threat in deep water wells (phys.org)
High Levels of Arsenic Found in Groundwater Near Fracking Sites (ecowatch.com)
Groundwater Depletion Continues Throughout US (acogblog.wordpress.com)

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