This learn node clusters material about the dangerous presence of arsenic in ground water of the United States as illustrated the map here from the U.S. Geological Survey’s Water Quality Assessment Analysis of Trace Elements webpage. Information on the world wide arsenic in drinking water problem is abundant on the World Health Organization Arsenic in drinking water Fact Sheet.
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A look at an example of the arsenic problem in drinking water is provided by the American Museum of Natural History’s 2007-08 special exhibit on Water, which describes a situation where arsenic foiled attempts to get good water by drilling below bacterial contamination:
In Bangladesh, millions of deep wells were drilled to end use of bacteria-laced surface water. It worked: for instance, infant mortality dropped sharply. But many of the wells turned out to contain high levels of naturally occurring arsenic—an extremely toxic chemical element with serious health effects. Today, experts are working to develop inexpensive methods of removing arsenic from the water.
So how would you get arsenic out of water? Three pages from a Stiochiometry tutorial at Carnegie Mellon University’s openlearning initiative describes a method developed by Prof. Fakhrul Islam, a chemist at Bangladesh’s Rajshahi University. The tutorial is Arsenic remediation: Using powder to absorb arsenic from water.
