In 1977, a Japanese Engineer Did Something Geology Normally Takes Millions of Years to Do
After two decades of solitary experimentation, a Japanese engineer isolated a functioning phase of Earth’s energy system and brought it into the human world. History barely noticed.
A Question the Origin-of-Life Models Leave Open
For the past several posts I have been following a question that began with something very simple: how minerals and water interact in living systems.
While trying to understand that interaction more deeply, I eventually ran into a puzzle that the conventional origin-of-life literature does not fully address. I did not arrive at it all at once. It surfaced gradually as I worked my way through the geochemistry and the origin-of-life papers that many of you may already be familiar with.
Most scientific models attempt to explain how life first began, how the earliest metabolic reactions might have emerged at rock–water interfaces billions of years ago.
That work is fascinating and extraordinarily important. But as I sat with it, another question began to trouble me.
If those mineral reactions truly helped ignite life’s first energy systems, how have the conditions that sustain them persisted for four billion years?
The more I thought about that question, the harder it became to ignore.
As I followed it through geology, mineral chemistry, and the movement of water through the Earth’s crust, three conclusions gradually came into focus. Even if you did not follow every step of that investigation, the core ideas themselves are surprisingly simple.
Once they came into focus, they could be stated quite plainly.
The first realization was that Earth appears to operate through what Matt Bakos and I eventually came to call the Rock–Water Circuit, a planetary-scale interaction between minerals and circulating water that moves energy and matter continuously through the crust.
In its simplest form, the Rock–Water Circuit is a planetary system in which circulating water interacts with iron-bearing minerals to generate redox and electrochemical gradients, moving energy and matter through the Earth’s crust and back again in a continuous geochemical circuit.
Once that picture came into view, something else became obvious.
Any planetary circuit like this must operate through a specific chemistry.
The second thing that became clear to me was that this circuit is powered by a specific iron–sulfur–aluminum–water chemistry, what I came to call ISAW, through which minerals and water generate and transmit electrochemical energy.
ISAW describes the elemental chemistry; the Rock–Water Circuit is the planetary-scale expression of that chemistry.
The third realization was perhaps the most surprising.
ISAW chemistry does more than establish the energetic conditions from which life could emerge. Our breakthrough was in recognizing that the very same reactions that generate those gradients also participate in the continual renewal of the mineral systems that sustain them.
It was Matt who first recognized something that now seems almost obvious once you see it: sulfur-bearing rainwater slowly weathers minerals such as biotite, reopening their layered structures and releasing their chemistry back into soils and waters.
In other words, the same iron–sulfur–water reactions that help generate electrochemical gradients also regenerate the mineral environments in which those gradients arise.
That observation changed the way I began to see the system. The Rock–Water Circuit does not just create energy. It renews the gradients through which energy flows.
In thermodynamic terms, it continually regenerates the gradients through which energy dissipates.
Life’s energy system begins in geology.
And it renews itself there.
What This Means for the Origin of Life
Once I saw the system that way, much of the origin-of-life literature suddenly looked different.
Investigators such as Michael J. Russell, Nick Lane, William F. Martin, John Baross, and Günter Wächtershäuser demonstrated that life’s earliest metabolism likely arose from mineral-driven redox chemistry operating at rock–water interfaces, while researchers such as biophysicist Helen Hansma, a former National Science Foundation program director, explored how layered minerals like mica might have provided catalytic surfaces capable of organizing early biomolecules.
Most origin-of-life models, therefore, focus on the conditions under which life first appeared, and this body of work has been central in revealing how mineral-driven redox chemistry could generate those initial energetic gradients.
What began to emerge from the Rock–Water Circuit suggested something different: the same mineral chemistry capable of generating those initial energetic conditions also appears capable of continually renewing them through the slow geological machinery of the Earth itself.
Although the insight may appear novel, what struck me was how little the origin-of-life literature discusses the problem of renewal. Any planetary energy system operating for billions of years must possess some mechanism that continually restores the gradients on which it depends.
When a Human Isolated a Phase of the Planetary Circuit
Up to this point, the Rock–Water Circuit appears as a purely geological system, unfolding across the planet through minerals, water, pressure, and immense spans of time.
For most of Earth’s history, this system operated entirely within geology. That changed in the twentieth century, when a human being isolated part of it. And the person who changed it was not a famous scientist.
For billions of years, nature had carried out this chemistry through pressure, water, sulfur, and geological time. What geology normally performs slowly and invisibly within rock, a Japanese engineer managed to reproduce under human-scale conditions.
In 1977, after more than two decades of solitary experimentation, he succeeded in isolating a working phase of that same process.
Without inventing new chemistry or bypassing Earth’s processes, he succeeded in extracting and preserving a single operational link within the ISAW cycle, rendering a geologically produced energy-organizing chemistry transferable beyond its original mineral vessel.
His name was Asao Shimanishi.
The more I sat with what Shimanishi had done, the more it struck me that scientific discoveries usually reveal processes that occur in nature, while technological inventions create processes that did not previously exist. Shimanishi’s work fell into a third, historically unusual category of discovery: he succeeded in isolating and stabilizing a functioning phase of a planetary process.
For billions of years, this chemistry operated only within the slow machinery of the Earth itself. Water circulated through rock; mineral lattices hydrated and exchanged ions with passing water; electrochemical gradients formed and dissipated; and the planetary energy architecture sustained the conditions under which life eventually emerged and evolved.
The possibility that a functional phase of this system could be isolated from its mineral host and carried beyond it would have seemed improbable, even impossible.
The person who accomplished this was not a famous academic, nor a government laboratory, nor a large industrial research group.
It was a single individual working largely outside the scientific mainstream.
The Question That Volcanic Water Raised
Shimanishi did not begin with any ambition to manipulate planetary chemistry. His concern was far more practical.
As early as the 1950s, he had become troubled by the possibility that modern agriculture and industrial development were gradually stripping soils and water of the complex spectrum of trace minerals that had historically sustained both ecosystems and human nutrition.
What troubled him most was not simply mineral depletion, but the possibility that the vitality observed in certain mineral environments might arise from a broader spectrum of elements than modern water and agriculture typically carried.
Shimanishi had long observed that volcanic regions often produced springs whose waters were reputed to possess unusual biological effects. In those environments, groundwater moved through iron-rich volcanic minerals and emerged carrying a broad spectrum of dissolved elements. To him, these mineral waters looked like small windows into the chemistry that once circulated widely through Earth’s crust.
To Shimanishi, volcanic rocks, particularly iron-rich micas and their weathered derivatives such as vermiculite, looked like compressed archives of Earth’s surface chemistry, packed with an extraordinary range of trace elements embedded within their layered mineral lattices.
Shimanishi began to wonder whether the biological value of certain natural waters might arise not from a single mineral, but from the balanced spectrum of elements released when water interacts with these complex mineral systems.
His ambition eventually crystallized into a simple idea.
He wanted to produce what he called a “superior solution”: a water carrying a mineral spectrum resembling the elemental environment present in nature when life first emerged.
It was an idea simple enough to describe in a sentence, yet difficult enough to occupy the next twenty years of his life.
A Miner Turns Alchemist
Producing the “superior solution” Shimanishi imagined proved extraordinarily difficult.
Vermiculite, the mineral Shimanishi eventually focused on, is itself a weathered derivative of biotite, a layered iron-bearing mica formed deep within Earth’s crust. Although vermiculite is more open and hydrated than biotite, its minerals remain tightly bound within stacked aluminosilicate sheets.
Simply mixing the mineral with water would not release the desired spectrum of ions. Strong acids could dissolve the structure entirely, but doing so would produce unstable and potentially toxic mixtures. Gentle leaching methods were safer but painfully slow, often producing only weak solutions after years of extraction.
For nearly two decades, Shimanishi experimented relentlessly, adjusting one variable at a time.
He altered temperatures, acid strengths, reaction times, sulfur sources, heating and cooling cycles, and filtration methods. Each change solved one problem but created several new ones. Too harsh a treatment destabilized the chemistry. Too gentle a process released almost nothing.
He was searching for a narrow balance: a stable liquid in which the mineral spectrum embedded within mica-derived rock could be released into water as bioavailable ions without disrupting the system's chemical equilibrium.
Sulfur chemistry eventually became central to the process. In retrospect, aspects of this process resemble what modern geochemists now study as enhanced weathering, the accelerated chemical breakdown of minerals in water to release ions and alter surrounding geochemistry. Under carefully controlled conditions, sulfur-based reactions could convert certain minerals into water-soluble sulfate forms while simultaneously helping undesirable metals precipitate or be filtered out.
The method was technically unforgiving. A change in one parameter could disrupt several others. Progress came slowly.
But after nearly twenty years of iteration, failure, and refinement, Shimanishi finally arrived at a process that produced what he had been seeking.
In 1977, he arrived at a method that produced a liquid solution containing a broad spectrum of minerals, dominated by iron and sulfur, while the remaining elements appeared only in minute (yet still active) amounts. He named this extract Themarox, or “Rock Water.”
What Shimanishi Actually Achieved
The mineral complex Shimanishi released from vermiculite contained an unusually broad spectrum of trace elements derived from the original mica structure. The elements all appeared as sulfate salts, reflecting the sulfur chemistry that played a central role in the extraction process.
But something more subtle had occurred as well, something that only became clear to me much later.
His extraction process did not simply dissolve minerals into water. Instead, it released and stabilized a complex mineral spectrum derived from the vermiculite lattice in a state that kept the elements dispersed in aqueous solution instead of precipitating out.
The resulting liquid mineral extract therefore behaves much like naturally mineralized waters, carrying a spectrum of ions that can condition the electrochemical environment of the surrounding water.
Understanding what Shimanishi had actually done required stepping briefly into an unexpected corner of physical chemistry.
Why the “Structured Water” Debate Is So Confused
At this point, I need to pause briefly and clarify the language I have used throughout these essays and earlier drafts of both The Blueprint Of Life and From Volcanoes To Vitality.
For many years, discussions about unusual water behavior have often revolved around the idea of “structured water.” The phrase is appealing because it is intuitive: it suggests that water molecules can become more ordered under certain conditions, particularly near surfaces, minerals, or dissolved ions.
Yet the term has also become deeply controversial within the scientific community.
Part of the difficulty is that the phrase “structured water” is used to describe several very different phenomena. Some researchers use it to refer to the well-established ordering that occurs at interfaces, where water molecules align along mineral surfaces or biological membranes. Others use it to describe more persistent or bulk changes in liquid water, claims that water can adopt stable organized states extending far beyond the molecular scale normally expected in liquid systems.
Because the same phrase is applied to such different ideas, discussions about “structured water” often end up talking past one another.
Even among water chemists who accept that water can exhibit varying degrees of molecular organization, there is no broad consensus that a distinct, stable “structured water” phase exists in bulk liquid water. The physical chemistry of liquid water is extremely complex, and while transient hydrogen-bond networks constantly form and reorganize, many researchers remain skeptical that these momentary structures can persist long enough to constitute a separate, stable state of water.
There is also little agreement about how such a state would be reliably identified if it did exist. Different research groups have proposed a wide range of experimental approaches, including nuclear magnetic resonance, infrared spectroscopy, ultraviolet absorption, electrical conductivity measurements, and other physical probes. Each of these methods measures a different property of water, and none has yet emerged as a universally accepted diagnostic for identifying a distinct “structured” state.
Finally, even if such states could be clearly demonstrated, there remains no consensus about their biological relevance. Some researchers argue that variations in water organization may influence biochemical reactions or cellular processes, while others maintain that biological systems operate primarily through well-understood ionic and molecular interactions without requiring any special water phase.
Taken together, these uncertainties have left the term “structured water” in an ambiguous position. The phrase captures an intuition that water behavior can change depending on its chemical environment, but it does not identify the physical mechanism responsible for those changes.
What matters is not a mystical property of water itself, but the mineral chemistry dissolved within it.
This distinction also explains why many devices that claim to “structure” or “energize” water are unlikely to produce durable changes. Mechanical agitation, electromagnetic fields, pressure pulses, or other treatments may briefly alter hydrogen-bond arrangements or electrochemical conditions within water.
But without a stable mineral or ionic framework to sustain those changes, the underlying molecular networks rapidly relax back toward equilibrium. In other words, transient ordering is not the same thing as a persistent chemical environment. Without dissolved ions capable of maintaining electrochemical structure, attempts to impose order on pure water amount to little more than momentary perturbations of an extremely dynamic liquid.
Once the question is framed this way, a much older and far more precise framework comes into view.
A More Useful Framework: Hofmeister Chemistry
As this work evolved, I gradually realized that a far older and far more precise framework already existed for describing how dissolved minerals influence water's behavior. That framework originates in the work of the nineteenth-century chemist Franz Hofmeister.
It took me a while to arrive at Hofmeister, because for these many months, the language around ‘structured water’ had seemed both suggestive and unsatisfying at the same time.
Hofmeister discovered that different dissolved ions influence the organization of water in reproducible ways. Some ions promote tighter organization of surrounding water molecules by strengthening hydrogen-bond networks and stabilizing hydration shells around dissolved ions and biomolecules.
Others have the opposite effect, loosening those interactions and promoting disorder. These opposing tendencies are now known as kosmotropic (order-promoting) and chaotropic (disorder-promoting) ion effects, concepts derived from the original Hofmeister series.
This distinction turns out to be enormously useful because it allows us to describe water behavior without invoking vague or disputed terminology. Instead of asking whether water is “structured” or “unstructured,” we can ask a more precise question: what kinds of ions are present, and how do they influence the organization of the surrounding water environment?
When viewed through this lens, Shimanishi’s extract becomes easier to understand.
Analyses of Shimanishi’s Themarox extract reveal an unusually dense spectrum of strongly kosmotropic ions, particularly sulfate, magnesium, iron, and aluminum, present in concentrations rarely encountered together in aqueous solution. From the standpoint of Hofmeister chemistry, such a composition would be expected to strongly favor ordered hydration structures in the surrounding water.
Rather than “structuring” water in some mysterious way, the spectrum of ions released from the vermiculite lattice alters the Hofmeister balance of the water to which it is added, introducing ions capable of promoting more ordered electrochemical interactions within the solution.
This shift in perspective moves the discussion away from the ambiguous language of structured water and toward the well-established chemistry of ion-water interactions.
What I Eventually Realized Shimanishi Had Done
Seen this way, Shimanishi’s achievement becomes less mysterious and, in some respects, even more remarkable. He did not create a new form of water. What he succeeded in isolating was a mineral chemistry capable of conditioning water into an electrochemically active state, much like the mineralized waters that naturally emerge from geothermal systems throughout the Earth’s crust.
In the framework developed throughout this book, something even deeper had occurred.
What Shimanishi did, unknowingly, was reproduce the sequence of ISAW chemistry under human-scale conditions.
He did not attempt to open biotite, because that transformation belongs to geology alone and unfolds only across immense spans of time. Instead, he began with vermiculite, the mineral that had already passed through confinement, hydration, sulfur exposure, and structural opening.
By applying heat to drive off interlayer water and carefully introducing sulfuric acid to supply protons and redox activity, he recreated the final stages of the geological sequence under controlled conditions.
What normally unfolds underground through pressure, water, sulfur, and time had been accelerated and isolated in a laboratory process.
A geologically produced mineral–water chemistry had been separated from its rock host and stabilized in liquid form for the first time.
A Historically Unparalleled Achievement
Asao Shimanishi’s accomplishment is historically unusual for another reason: the persistence with which he pursued a single technical problem for more than two decades, largely alone, until it finally yielded.
What also struck me was how unusual this was in the history of science. Most long-sought scientific achievements unfold within collaborative research programs, where ideas evolve gradually through a shared momentum of experiments, publications, and competing laboratories. Shimanishi’s work did not proceed that way. Although he drew on the general tools of chemistry, there was no established field attempting what he was attempting: releasing and stabilizing a broad mineral spectrum from rock in aqueous form without dissolving the mineral system itself.
His focus remained remarkably narrow. He was trying to solve a single problem without institutional support, collaborators, or external validation.
For twenty years, he was guided by one conviction: that restoring the mineral architecture modern life was quietly losing might matter more for biology than any single drug.
He worked directly with rock, heat, water, sulfur, and time. Progress came through repetition, failure, adjustment, and patience measured in years rather than experiments.
Shimanishi had one rock, one question, and the discipline to remain with it until the problem finally yielded.
Author’s Note on Stewardship
Encountering Shimanishi’s work did more than reshape my understanding of minerals and water. It imposed a responsibility.
If what he had isolated truly represented a recoverable phase of the Rock–Water Circuit, then leaving it confined to obscurity would have been, in my view, a failure of stewardship rather than restraint.
For that reason, midway through writing this book, I, along with my wife Lisa and my long-time practice partner at the Leading Edge Clinic, Scott Marsland, took the practical step of founding The Asao Group, a company that has made this extract accessible for careful, ethical use in drinking water (Aurmina) and for agricultural applications (Primorabio).
Some readers will undoubtedly question this decision, but know that I did not embark on this effort solely for commercial reasons; instead, my motivation was threefold: to make a profit, fund research, and disseminate philanthropically. In fact, those principles are explicitly stated in the Asao Group’s operating agreement as the guideposts for all future corporate decisions.
I insisted on this to preserve and carry forward Shimanishi’s ethos: to help humanity.
In this way, the formation of the Asao Group is an attempt to ensure that a potentially consequential material, if validated through continued observation and study, would not remain locked behind geography, language, or historical accident.
The scientific argument of this book stands independently of that effort; the company arose in response to it, not as its justification.
An Older Pattern Comes Into View
In Shimanishi’s own region of Japan alone, the accessible vermiculite reserves are sufficient for centuries, perhaps millennia, of human-scale application.
This is not a scarce remedy.
It is a geological inheritance.
If understood and applied responsibly, it may represent a path not only for human health but for the gradual restoration of soils, waters, and living systems worldwide.
At first, I believed Shimanishi’s discovery was simply an unusual chemical achievement. As I looked more closely, I began to notice that the patterns revealed by this chemistry were not entirely new.
Scientific discoveries sometimes illuminate patterns that were noticed long before they were understood.
If a specific mineral–water chemistry capable of organizing electrochemical energy has been operating quietly within the Earth for billions of years, and if a human being has now managed to isolate a working phase of that chemistry, another question naturally follows.
Why do ancient traditions, alchemical writings, and even fragments of early scripture appear to describe processes that resemble this same mineral–water transformation?
The chapters that follow explore how this pattern connects the history of science with far older attempts to understand the relationship between matter, water, and the organizing forces of life.
*If what you just read raised questions about the mineral system at the center of it, you can explore it further at Aurmina.com or Primorabio.com, where we are working to make Shimanishi’s extraordinary achievement more widely available for both drinking water and agricultural applications.
If you value the late nights and deep dives into all the “rabbit holes” I write about (or the Op-Eds and lectures I generate for the public), your support is greatly appreciated.
From Research to Practice - Links Below
So amazed at your deep dive into all of this on our behalf. Obviously before attempting any constructive comments, I need another half dozen passes, NO make it a dozen.
I've been watering my newly planted raised beds (peas, lettuce, beets, etc) with a very dilute Aurmina solution for 3 weeks.