Entropy is pollution by heavy metals. Each metal has a threshold level of acidity below which it remains bound in the soil but beyond which its salts dissolve into the water. According to Bernhard Ulrich, a West German chemist, toxic aluminium ions begin to be released from the soil into the water when the pH reaches 4.2. Aluminium is now being linked with senile dementia, Altzheimer’s disease. Did the dinosaurs suffer from premature senile dementia caused by acid rain?
How are we creating this acidity? Mainly through industry—burning fossil fuels and sintering metalliferous ores to extract the metals. The by-product is sulphur dioxide, a noxious gas that eventually turns into sulfuric acid, one of the most corrosive mineral acids. The top ten sulphur dioxide polluting countries in the world in 1980 were emitting 100 million tons of sulphur dioxide a year. If anthroposaurs reached an advanced society they must have added acids to the air and thence to the groundwater. It takes 5000 years for the world’s groundwater to replenish. If it became a poisonous soup of acid and heavy metal ions, it would be 5000 years before it became usable again. Even in the Cretaceous, with its higher rainfall, it could have remained polluted for 1000 years. The poisoning of the earth’s groundwater could be a very effective way of initiating a mass extinction.
Plenty of heavy metals are associated with the end of the Cretaceous and the death of the dinosaurs. The experts say they came from metal bearing meteorites or local volcanoes. But if human beings are anything to go by, an intelligent creature can easily produce enough heavy metals to pollute the environment without having to resort to natural causes. Nature causes 325,000 tons of copper to leach into the world’s water supply every year, but humanity annually extracts 7.5 million tons of copper and most of that will finish up as waste. The figure is increasing.
Cores from the Arctic ice cap show that lead in the air is now 500 times its natural level, the increase having principally occurred since the industrial revolution. Lead is a cumulative poison—it is stored in the body until danger levels are exceeded. Our own bodies contain more than 1000 times more lead than our recent ancestors. Lead poisons the nervous system and the brain by interfering with enzymes. Young minds are particularly affected. The symptoms, at dosages that may well be far below the official toxicity level, are distractibility, impatience, frustration, restlessness, impulsiveness, destructiveness and violence—symptoms typical of the behavior of much of our urban youth!
The clay band of the Alverez’s does not only contain iridium; it is full of heavy metals. Other metals in the boundary layer at abundances higher than normal are osmium, palladium, arsenic, chromium, cobalt, selenium, nickel and tin. These metals are not only found in extra-terrestrial sources. Terrestrial sources such as copper-nickel ores and molybdenum sulfide ores also contain many of these unusual metals, concentrated naturally by molecular filtration which traps the metal in the crystal lattice of the basic material of the ore. But such mechanisms occur in particular localities and cannot account for a worldwide distribution.
If, though, these metal ores had been mined, smelted and processed to get at the copper, nickel or molybdenum, the flue gases would have carried off the remaining metals to pollute the environment widely. The concentration of the metals in the boundary layer varies from place to place just as one would expect from sites that might have been close to, or distant from, an industrial area. Furthermore ores from different sources, processed in different places, would have had different compositions so the analysis of the boundary layer in different places would be expected to vary as researchers have found. A death star would have a fixed composition and would distribute its components fairly uniformly. Death stars may be more romantic but common industrial pollution fits the description better.
When heavy metals are around, the natural responses of the earth can make things worse. Professor Frederick Challenger of Leeds University, England, has shown that organisms rid themselves of unwanted or poisonous elements by converting them into their methyl derivatives which, being volatile, disperse into the atmosphere. Marine algae get rid of mercury, lead, antimony and arsenic in this way, not to mention sulphur and iodine in large quantities. Dispersion of the latter elements is beneficial to organisms on land since without it they would suffer from sulphur or iodine deficiency. But methylated heavy metals are very toxic.
Methyl mercury was the agent of severe poisoning at Minimata in Japan where, for many years, a factory discharged mercury wastes into a bay which provided seafood for the local people. In the West, farmers using organic fungicidal dressings on their seeds get better yields because the grain does not rot in the ground. They also poison thousands of birds. The fungicides contain mercury.
Historians suspect that Napoleon died of arsenic poisoning from the arsenic salts used as a pigment in his bedroom wallpaper on St Helena. Fungi growing on the damp walls disposed of the unwanted arsenic by converting it into volatile methyl derivatives which the would-be emperor inhaled, slowly poisoning himself.
The authorities have banned a similar compound of tin used in an anti-fouling paint for boats because it causes genetic damage in shellfish.
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