Thursday, March 19, 2009
"Chemtrail" Analysis of Barium and Aluminum in Rainwater
Photo attached: B17 Contrails from WW-II, long before the birth of contrail hysteria.
I recently had a correspondence regarding a rainwater sample claimed to be contaminated by "chemtrails". The sample was submitted to a reputable laboratory and was found to contain 8 micro-grams of barium per liter, and with 1010 micrograms of aluminum. These kind of reports raise alarms among the chemtrail believers, as they superficially appear to validate the claims of some abnormal contamination of rainwater with insoluable minerals one does not anticipate will naturally come down from the sky. However, upon closer examination, the claims are not supported, and the mineral deposits at those or even higher levels are not something necessarily deliberately sprayed from airplanes. Below I share part of the discussion.
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Dear M.
Regarding that lab report, it would have been helpful if they would have also analyzed for rather common minerals such as calcium, sodium and so on, for comparisons. The barium levels identified at 8 micro-grams per liter is exceedingly tiny. By comparison, the EPA sets a limit of 2 milligrams per liter for barium in drinking water, which equal to 2 parts per million. Considering how one liter of water contains a thousand grams, that lab report indicates barium levels at 8 parts per Billion. Here's a website covering that issue, and a lot more about barium:
That's a great website, as you can look up different mineral or chemical compounds and get the basic info. There's a "quick link" index on the upper right of each page.
Looking up aluminum,
That website says EPA puts a "secondary maximum" of 0.05 to 2 milligrams/liter for drinking water, but that is not toxicity-based. It only addresses taste, smell and color of the water. So the lab report of 1010 micrograms, or 1.01 milligrams per liter, is close to the upper limit of that secondary maximum. It says we eat about 7-9 milligrams of aluminum in our food every day. So if you drank 7-9 liters of that rainwater, you'd be getting about that same amount as from food. I could not find any info there about drinking water toxicity, but aluminum is a major part of the Earth's crustal material, so life fairly well evolved with it. I would not expect its natural components to have a health problem except in the most extremely high concentrations, or if you were breathing high concentrations of aluminum powder, as in a machine-shop environment. There's probably a bigger problem with aluminum cooking pots, or people overdosing on aluminum compounds in antacid pills, or aluminum in anti-perspirants, and you'll know those controversies.
The lab report says they used "EPA 6010B" as the method of analysis, which employs Atomic Emission Spectrometry. This basically means they evaporate the sample to get the mineral residues onto I think a glass slide, which is then inserted into the spectrometer chamber where it is subjected to very high temperatures. The "flame" or plasma from that heated sample is then subjected to optical spectrometry and the height of various emission bands gives them an indication of the constituents and quantities. See here for example:
In conclusion I would say the measured amounts of aluminum were not especially alarming or unusual, and the barium was probably at the limits of instrumental detection. Obviously this person did not bring a full liter of rainwater to the lab, so the lab extrapolated up to give the amounts of barium in a full liter. It would help also to know the atmospheric conditions at the time of the rainfall event, if for example one of those Asian dust clouds was hitting the West Coast, then some of that desert aerosol material would be in the rainwater for your region. That report lists the sample date as early February, which I thought was dry in your area as it was here. So did he scoop up some snow for the sample? And if so, was it snow from the prior December? If so, that would have a month to accumulate dusts settling down on it, and therefore amplify the quantities of minerals.
In any case, barium is a trace mineral in soils, so it is present in desert dusts, fire-smoke, aerosols, as well as coming out of tail-pipes, smoke-stacks and aircraft exhaust. Aluminum is a major component of the Earth's crust, so that is not surprising either, even at the higher levels. I added the attached paragraphs below to my "chemtrail" webpage:
I also added, to that chemtrail webpage, the quotations from Wilhelm Reich's publications where he says jet contrails are the sign of a healthy cloud-forming atmosphere. His observations remain true, even as the increase in global population and civil aviation have created far more jets, and jet contrails, than during his time.
James DeMeo, Ph.D.
Director OBRL
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New Additions to Chemtrail Page
For those who want a global satellite view of the problem of dusts and aerosols, and pollutants from urban industrial regions, I highly recommend to view the TOMS satellite images, which are put into a moving day-to-day loop at this website:
This website shows how tiny invisible aerosol dust-particles move from the large Saharasian Desert Belt outwards around the globe, to affect and choke-up distant regions. It also tracks aerosol particles from agricultural smoke, as from the widespread "slash and burn" methods used in the tropical regions. It additionally detects and displays sulfate pollution in the atmosphere, as comes from industrial regions. In fact, from observing a few days of this moving satellite loop, one gains the impression that there are very few places on our small planet which are not periodically afflicted with aerosol and chemical air pollution from desert-dusts, agricultural burning, or industrial pollution. In fact, industrial pollution seems to constitute the smallest fraction of the problem, though in the Northern Hemisphere regions removed from both big deserts and burning tropical forests and grasslands, it is the major problem.
It suggests an atmospheric problem which began many thousands of years ago, of massive deserts and fire-smokes spreading their hazy and stagnant atmospheres around the world and even across the oceans, creating droughts and heat-waves in distant lands. When those fearing of "chemtrails" look up in the sky and see the thin hazy layer which blocks out the sun, or when the lower atmosphere if filled with hazy aerosol pollution (which can include all the mineral constituents of soils) and suffer respiratory problems, the long-distant transportation of desert-dusts, agricultural smokes and industrial pollution is the very likely cause. That they should observe airplanes scooting through that same atmosphere, and leaving contrails behind them, is with few exceptions purely coincidental.
Some of the chemtrail websites identify laboratory results where rainwater was analyzed for the presence of unusual minerals. However, the presence of insoluble minerals in rainwater, such as aluminum or barium, is a fairly natural occurrence, and cannot be attributed automatically to some kind of mysterious aerial spraying. Raindrops form around tiny mineral aerosol particles, the cloud condensation nuclei, and those particulates come down with the rainwater.
Certainly from aircraft alone there is much "stuff" coming out the exhaust, and close to airports where they cruise at lower altitude in the landing and take-off patterns, that material will quickly drift down to the ground. Gasoline and kerosene as used in propeller or jet aircraft is a toxic brew, with all kinds of mineral material in it which was brought up from deep within the Earth when the crude oil is originally pumped, plus all the additives and conditioners put into the fuel at the refineries. Homes close to airports will sometimes get quite a dose of this, and the jet exhaust can even be smelled. Likewise, in industrial regions where the burning of petroleum products or coal is abundant, these and many other naturally-occurring minerals, plus other exotic compounds created from combustion, will be injected into the lower atmosphere, and blow widely around. Likewise in regions of heavy automobile traffic, the air can be thick with such particulates and minerals for similar reasons.
Such minerals are also natural constituents of the Earth's crust, which is how they get into the petroleum products and coal materials in the first place. They are also taken up into vegetation from soils and groundwater, and from there can be injected into the atmosphere when the vegetation burns. Tropical soils are especially rich in aluminum and iron oxides, and barium is a trace mineral found in soils and glacial loess. Dust storms over the large deserts, or from barren loess regions inject massive quantities of this material into the atmosphere.
An internet search of word groups or phrases such as "barium in soils" or "aluminum in aerosols", "barium in desert dusts", etc., will turn up dozens to thousands of websites, mostly being research papers by agricultural scientists, geologists or air pollution specialists. One merely has to review the titles or Abstracts of those articles to confirm how these and many other mineral constituents are found in fire-smokes and desert or glacial-loess dust clouds, being blown around in the atmosphere globally, and sprayed out tail-pipes and industrial smoke-stacks around the world.
We should therefore expect to find those minerals in any atmosphere where desert dusts or agricultural smokes are blowing around, and of course the weblink given above to the TOMS aerosol satellite gives a real-time confirmation of the worst aspects of this problem. This is basic "Air Pollution 101" science, which seems to be thrown out the window in all the rush to blame atmospheric problems on the CIA, or the UN, or Morphing Space Lizards.
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