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Its the sand. While black sand may look "cool" you can get metal leaching from it. I have had several club members thru the years have this happen.
The trend looks good.
I figured you would find this interesting. Turtle sent me a sample of the sand from his tank. I had a lab tech who was kind enough to run it through an electron microscope. As you can see, the cluster in the green box is fairly high in nickel. The more cubical shapes around the cluster are salt crystals. Most of the grains of sand we looked at did not have these clusters, but the ones that did had multiples of them. My thinking is that this is a fairly isolated problem in this particular batch of sand and these nickel inclusions may not be common.I’ve never been a fan of black sand from a chemical standpoint, but I have no idea if it’s the cause.
Very nice.
Mayb the vanadium rich materials already dissolved, if this was from an in-tank sample.
It is possible. We may have also just missed it. Keep in mind we only scanned one side of 20 or so grains of sand. That took almost an hour. We only found nickel on 4 or 5 of the grains. It is very possible that we didn't find the vanadium because of the small sample size.Very nice.
Maybe the vanadium rich materials already dissolved, if this was from an in-tank sample.
So are you saying the Hawaiian black is ok? I just bought 5x20 lb bags of the indo-pacific black and I am greatly concerned now. I know you have not said you tested the indo-pacific, but if the Hawaiian black is ok, I may mix that and the good 'ol dry aragonite to get the black and white mix.We also put a sample of the Hawaiian black sand in the SEM. They couldn't look more different. This sand was much more chemically uniform and had few inclusions of any type. It was also distractingly beautiful.
So are you saying the Hawaiian black is ok? I just bought 5x20 lb bags of the indo-pacific black and I am greatly concerned now. I know you have not said you tested the indo-pacific, but if the Hawaiian black is ok, I may mix that and the good 'ol dry aragonite to get the black and white mix.