Is Mother Earth Poisoning Us? Sweet Mother Earth… source of all things natural, all things or

Is Mother Earth Poisoning Us? Sweet Mother Earth… source of all things natural, all things organic, all things that nourish life. But our Mother Earth has an evil side, one that is trying to poison us through no fault of our own. That evil side contains all the natural toxic heavy metals that can kill us. There’s a great emphasis of late of the effect of toxic metals that have been released into the environment as a dangerous source of a number of potentially deadly illnesses. Usually human carelessness or ignorance is blamed. But today, I’m going to indict Mother Earth herself as the source of naturally occurring toxic heavy metals. These are elements of high atomic number (that is, these are “heavy” in weight) that reside in the earth’s crust but can enter our food chain, our drinking water, even the atmosphere without any human help. We can all realize that any element in some horrendous quantity can harm us, but most of the heavy metal toxins are dangerous in concentration of parts per million or even parts per billion (one part per million is 0 .0001 %: one percent is one part in a hundred by comparison). One reason these toxic metals are so overlooked yet so hazardous is just plain old chemistry. These toxic metals can replace a benign metal within one of our body’s organic molecules: cadmium can replace zinc, lead replace calcium, and many, like mercury, accumulate in the body and stay there for decades. Some heavy metals inhibit organic chemical activity in an organism, others attack DNA itself. Chromium tends to like to stay within its chief ore mineral, chromite, in particular when that mineral has a lot of iron in it (so that the chrome bonds as a trivalent ion) rather than aluminum (with which it bonds as a hexavalent ion). Luckily, most chromite ores occur in ultrabasic rocks, slabs or rocks that originated in the earth’s mantle. When introduced into an acidic environment (say, via tectonic shuffling in the crust), hexavalent chrome can leave the chromite and enter the ecosystem, wreaking potential havoc to DNA and thus provoking cancer. California restricts Cr+6 to 0.02 parts per billion in drinking water! Naturally occurring cadmium is found in sulfide ore deposits such as those mined for zinc and gold, but we’ve also found it associated with nickel deposits and even mantle sources. Cadmium doesn’t fit well into molecular structures, and tends to come out easily, and, having no place else to go, stay and stay and stay… It can cause flu-like symptoms (called the “Cadmium Blues”) or lung and kidney damage, or replace zinc in arteries making them dangerously inflexible. Toxic limits in water: 4 parts per million! A lot of heavy metals are concentrated in the earth’s crust via circulating hot fluids, called hydrothermal systems. Among these, mercury can damage your brain as well as lungs and kidneys. Its ore is cinnabar, a sulfide; this is deposited when it is carried by hot waters circulating around hot volcanic intrusions, sometimes forming veins at distances of kilometers from the volcano itself. And it’s toxic at levels of two parts per billion! Another, arsenic ore, a real favorite among killers when processed, also occur in these sorts of veins, sometimes along with the cinnabar. And thallium, well, thallium you don’t even want to touch, also can be found in many of the metals coming from these sulfide mining sites: thallium can kill out outright, and make you lose your hair to boot! Platinum can occur with these hydrothermal minerals, or in mantle rocks, or simply hanging around like gold in old stream deposits: It is so poisonous it doesn’t even have a lower limit of toxicity, and is so hazardous that it’s used to kill cancer cells via chemotherapy. Sort of makes you want to stay away from volcanoes… and mines… and the Earth in general… But, happily for our loving Mother Nature, most of the really toxic concentrations of heavy metals occur through the industrial enrichment that they undergo for use by us, and then the haphazard disposal of the products we make of them. I’ll let Mother Earth plead innocent to the charge of involuntary manslaughter, without intent of poisoning her children. She loves us, after all! Annie R Graphic: I overlaid the “toxic” symbol onto the NASA earth image. Read more about the Wicked Side of Mother Earth:http://peer.tamu.edu/curriculum_modules/Properties/Module_4/lesson3.htmhttp://www.tvernonlac.com/toxicmetals.htmlhttp://www.lenntech.com/processes/heavy/heavy-metals/heavy-metals.htmhttp://medicine.med.nyu.edu/conditions-we-treat/conditions/cadmium-toxicity -- source link

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