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Originally Posted by michiganfarmer
I find this very hard to believe.
I understand the ground to be a filter. I think that if manure was able to seep through 80' of earth into our vein of groundwater, then manure from millions of years of animals would have already ruined all ground water.
Show me your PHd, or get cabin fever here to tell me you are right. Otherwise I wont belive you.
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I don't need a PHd to read a purity report. Again, it doesn't say that the water is non-drinkable. Just there are fractions of percentages of stuff in it.
Now, there is stuff that I've had to deal with in the past few years:
All the military training on posts since 1993 has required that we set up port-o-potties in our training areas. We were told that the urinating in the woods and doing number twos had an impact on the well water in the area and the army had been threatened with $5000 fines if any of our soldiers is caught using the woods for a bathroom. (and those court orders probably came from a local homesteader who noticed a peculiar tang in his well water and asked for an analysis)
Tooth decay is a documented statistic since people have started drinking bottled water. Floridated municipal water had stopped tooth decay for a while, but now towns are getting cheap about paying for the process. So nationwide we're turning into toothless bottled water swillers.
Though the ground is a filter, water still travels through it as a current in "underground" rivers that flow ever so slowly (like 5 meters a day). Back in my geology class our professor (a PHd) cited the local chemical plant and how they traced toxins in the well water to their factory 30 miles away. Years (not millions) had passed for the poisons to travel the underground currents to the drinking water of citizens miles away. They were able to prove this by purposefully dumping a barrel of "harmless" radioactive isotope into the ground at the plant. They new the rate of flow and direction and had wells along the way to test. sure enough, after a year or so, one of the test wells had been been contaminated, and another, and another.. until they were able to make a nifty animated map showing where, how fast, and what area the chemicals had been disbursing.
Once they were fined a couple million dollars and stopped burying their chemicals in the land, the toxins eventually flowed away after a few years. Simple mechanics here - Urinate in the river and the yellow stuff floats away downstream.
Your millions of years of animal feces does not stay trapped there for millions of years. It floats away through the ground and rocks. Over time, bacteria also consume it and break it down to simple compounds of sulphur, acids, minerals and CO2, returning minerals to the land But it may linger long enough in it's pathenogenic state to make its way to the well you've tapped for you to slurp in your lemonade.
....and for your entertainment, here's a nice link to one of many articles about formaldehyde turning up in well water from cemetaries:
http://www.motherjones.com/news/outf...9/01/cook.html
Apparently, formaldehyde is not really a problem yet as it takes years for the water from today's grave yards to flow to the wells of people a few miles away. What they ARE seeing now is arsenic - from bodies buried over a hundred years ago.
