Barium Leaks Straight From Fracked Rocks, Dartmouth Finds
Barium leaches directly from fracked rocks, Dartmouth team finds
Barium is a silvery heavy metal that is toxic to mammals. It is also found in another practice that happens without any consultation of the people – geoengineering, aka chemtrails in the sky, spewed out of extra jet exhausts placed on the jet. Now it appears that both sky and earth are deliberately saturated in barium – crops and water.
Since Barium is never found in nature as a free element – due to its high chemcial reactivity – the following results of a new study are startling indeed.
Dartmouth College researchers are shedding light on the early chemical reactions in the organic sediments that would ultimately become the Marcellus Shale, a major source of natural gas and petroleum.
The findings appear in the journal Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta. The research extends an earlier study by the Dartmouth team.
Water injected into shale formations in hydraulic fracturing returns with extraordinarily high total-dissolved-solids and high concentrations of the toxic metal barium.
The hazardous wastewater is assumed to be partly due to chemicals introduced into injected freshwater when it mixes with highly saline brine naturally present in the rock. But in their earlier study, the researchers found that chemical reactions between injected freshwater and the fractured shale itself caused barium to leach directly from the fractured rock.
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In the new study, the researchers addressed the basic question of when, why and how the Marcellus Shale became enriched in barium in the first place.
They studied in detail the chemistry, mineralogy and sulfur isotope composition of a two-inch thick core. It was a special sample as it contains about 5,000 micrograms of barium per gram of rock. Such samples are concentrated only at a few depth intervals in the Marcellus Shale. The sample provided the researchers with insight into how, when and where a barium bearing mineral (barite) altered into iron sulfide (pyrite) during the transformation of organic rich marine sediment into shale in Devonian times.
The researchers discovered barite grains being “bitten” by pyrite as the latter replaced the former through a complex set of reactions that could occur only at a very specific depth interval where both sulfate (barite) and sulfide (pyrite) are present. This interval is called the sulfate-methane transition zone, which has been identified in relatively recent sediments but not in 400 million year old sediments.
“Our new study provides insights into the generalized nature of barium mobilization as barite is dissolved in organic rich sediments and its redistribution in clay minerals,” says senior author Mukul Sharma, a professor of earth sciences.
Does the release of barium into the environment through fracking change your opinion of the practice? It seems as though midway 2016, there would have been more innovation toward finding better methods of finding energy without poisoning fresh drinking water, already hampered by toxic spills.
Sound off below!
This article appeared at Natural Blaze and can be republished with attribution and links. Make sure you grab you free ebook on the 40 Uses for Apple Cider Vinegar!
