So IIRC mercury doesn’t dissolve it just sinks to the bottom (of water). My question is, does that mercury being put into the water spread any particles throughout the water that would contaminate the actual water?
I’m asking this because I had this thought when reading a troll youtube comment about pouring mercury down the drain. Wouldn’t the mercury just sink somewhere and stay together so it can easily be removed? But then I thought, does mercury actually contaminate the water or do you have to physically consume the mercury to get poisoned?
Short answer: what you’ve got is elemental mercury and you could drink it straight (don’t) and you’d probably be fine unless you drank so much it clogged up something vital. You just wouldn’t want to vaporize and breathe it. Now, leave that mercury out somewhere in the dirt or water where microbes can convert it to organic methylmercury, then it would be dangerous.
I have a glass jar containing around an inch of mercury that I’ve had for around 25 years. Over that period, it has formed a grey film that floats on the surface and stains the sides of the bottle. I assume that it is an oxide. Don’t know if it is water-soluble, but if so, I could imagine an immersed glob of mercury very slowly oxidizing away into the water.
Mercury itself is insoluble in water … however some bacteria can methylate it into monomethylmercury … which is then taken up by fish and concentrated in the fish’s flesh … thus fish is the main source of mercury poisoning …
Elemental mercury is insoluble, so it will basically go in one end and out the other. In fact, mercury was used as a laxative in olden days, although this is now not recommended.
Yes, we have bacteria in our digestive systems, but are the same kind of bacteria as the ones that methylate mercury? A lot of people think that all bacteria are equivalent, but there’s a lot more diversity among bacteria than among all eucaryotes (plants, animals, fungi, and protozoans) combined.
