What Happens When Water Is Allowed to Tell the Truth

When black mica minerals are allowed to interact freely with your water, they reveal what modern treatment systems are designed to conceal. What falls out tells the real story. And it ain't pretty.

Aurmina End-of-Year Sale

As we close out Aurmina’s first year, really, its first few months, we wanted to mark the moment with something simple: gratitude.

Lisa, Scott, and I built Aurmina because we believed there was a missing piece in modern water treatment, and we’ve been genuinely moved by how many people immediately understood what we were trying to do. Watching this small company help real people has been deeply satisfying, and we wanted to say thank you.

Through the end of the year, we’re offering 25% off single bottles, with no limit on quantity. For those who already know they’ll be using Aurmina long-term, the 6-pack remains the best value at 34% off, so don’t outsmart yourself by buying six singles.

Discount Code: HOLIDAY

If you’ve been following my water series, you already know why this exists. Aurmina isn’t about stripping water down to nothing. It’s about restoring order, clarity, and purity after modern treatment has done its job.

And in the spirit of transparency (and a little humor), the first draft of the post below was written before Aurmina even existed. If that makes this post a marketing scheme, it’s the most accidental one I’ve ever been part of.

Either way, this is our thank-you. The sale runs through the end of the year.

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The “What’s In The Sediment” Post

Most people have never seen what their drinking water carries. Not because it isn’t there, but because, as discussed in this prior post, modern water treatment practices are designed to keep contaminants dissolved, dispersed, and chemically stable. As long as substances remain dissolved and below action limits, the water stays clear and is deemed “safe.”

This chapter is about what happens when that invisibility breaks.

Visibility as a Diagnostic Event

When mineral forces are reintroduced and water is allowed to behave according to basic physical and chemical rules, material falls out. What settles is not created by the process itself; it is released by it.

The sediment at the bottom of the container is a physical record of what modern water sources have been quietly transporting all along, industrial residues, destabilized minerals, altered organics, and fragments of a chemical history many people might assume had already been “treated away.”

It means that whatever entered the water along its journey to your home is no longer being held in suspension. To look at that sediment is to confront the difference between water that appears clean and water that actually is.

In untreated or minimally treated natural waters, minerals, organic compounds, metals, and particulates exist in dynamic equilibrium. In natural systems, this is how water cleans itself: particles bind, settle, are filtered through soil, or are taken up by biological systems.

Modern treatment systems interrupt this process. By aggressively controlling pH, oxidation state, and ionic strength, they prevent these interactions from occurring. The water remains visually clear, but chemically unresolved.

When mineral-rich water is reintroduced into such systems, whether through remineralization, contact with mineral substrates, or intentional mineral addition, aggregation becomes possible again. What appears is not contamination newly introduced, but contamination newly revealed.

Disclosure and Reader Context

I want to be transparent at the outset. My work over the past many months has led me deep into mineral science and water chemistry, and that research ultimately resulted in the creation of a company, Aurmina, which sells a mineral-based water purification product.

That overlap can understandably raise questions for new readers about motive or bias. I don’t try to hide that conflict. Instead, I encourage all skepticism, as I always have, of institutions, of products, of claims, and of me. Nothing in this Substack should be taken on trust alone; it should stand or fall on evidence, mechanisms, and reproducibility.

I am comfortable with that. The research summarized here predates Aurmina, is grounded in established chemistry and water science, and can be evaluated independently of any product. Readers are free to test, compare, disagree, or ignore entirely.

My goal here is less to persuade, and more to illuminate and educate in a way that restores agency to my readers.

Another reason I am careful not to frame this work as fear-based is simple reality: most of us have been drinking municipal water our entire lives without obvious catastrophe (just like R.O and distilled water drinkers). I’m a 1970s kid. I drank from garden hoses (heck, I still do). I’m alive, functional, and, on most days, doing just fine.

This work is not about acute toxicity or imminent danger. It is about cumulative burden, structural chemistry, and biological context. Some bodies tolerate that burden better than others (just ask my friends from college). Some environments amplify it and some water systems hide it more effectively than we realize.

Understanding that difference, and not panicking about it, is the point of this chapter.

The Misinterpretation of “Something Falling Out”

The appearance of particles are substances that water treatment had previously kept dissolved which are now binding, becoming visible, settling out, and thus becoming filterable.

This phenomenon explains why some mineral-based purification systems appear to “dirty” water before clarifying it. What is seen is the unmasking of chemical burden that was previously hidden by stabilization chemistry. The discomfort people feel when water changes appearance is rooted in expectation, not chemistry.

There is a simple way to understand what modern water is carrying that requires no charts, no epidemiology, and no trust in institutions. Basically, you add minerals, let the water sit, and watch what happens.

The Kory Family Water Treatment Plant

At home (seen below), I do not rely on municipal treatment alone, nor do I drink fully stripped R.O or distilled water that has not been “broadly re-mineralized.”.

Our purification system at home is simple. Fill all three containers with tap water, add Aurmina as per label (1-2 tsp per gallon - or more depending on the quality of your water). Once added, wait 24-72 hours (we like 48 hours but are not overly obsessive about it).

When the first container just to the right of our ceramic gravity filter “matures” at 48 hours, we pour everything except the sediment into the top chamber of the ceramic gravity filter to its left, then it goes to the “back of the line.”

Once the water enters the top chamber of the gravity filter, it is now in the “polishing” phase, whereby any remaining particulates are removed as it passes (very slowly) through the filter into the bottom chamber.

In this way, anytime we need water for drinking or cooking, we fill from the tap at the bottom of the gravity filter. Thus, all the water we consume is pure, clear and, get this, structured (if you don’t know what that means, enjoy this post).

What Falls Out Tells the Story

When water is allowed to interact with minerals freely, the resulting precipitates, flocs, or sediments reflect the history of that water, its source, its treatment, and its exposure to industrial, agricultural, and infrastructural inputs.

Surface water drawn downstream from agricultural regions behaves differently than deep groundwater. Water exposed to chlorination and corrosion control behaves differently than untreated spring water. Municipal water with long pipe residence times reveals different patterns than freshly treated water.

These differences are signatures.

The Sediment

Although most of the sediment is not classified as a toxin (although some is), most people don’t realize that, simply by virtue of it falling out of your water, it means that whatever it is, it otherwise would not be found in pristine mountain springs (which are unfortunately vanishing in number).

The finer point is that, by name and elemental components, they may sound like compounds that can be found in nature and/or are not known to be toxic, but again, by their falling out of the water, it means that those compounds have been modified by human and/or industrial activity in some way, or into some new form, which now makes it precipitate out of the water.

Such “non-toxic”, or more accurately, “supposedly” non-toxic compounds consist of industrial residues, destabilized minerals, and altered organics.

What A Century Of Sediment Analysis Has Found

The settled material formed during flocculation is not poorly characterized. In municipal water treatment plants, wastewater facilities, and laboratory jar tests, this material, often called “water treatment residuals” or sludge, has been studied routinely for more than a hundred years.

Environmental chemists analyze it using standard tools: ICP-MS and ICP-OES for metals and minerals; GC-MS and LC-MS for organic contaminants; FTIR and Raman spectroscopy for microplastics; SEM-EDS for particle morphology and elemental composition; and targeted assays for PFAS, pesticides, pharmaceuticals, and hormones.

What those analyses show, consistently, is something that, at first, I found somewhat reassuring, but no longer do.

What The Sediment Is Mostly Made Of

By mass, the sediment is overwhelmingly composed of structural material:

• iron or aluminum hydroxides that form the floc matrix itself,

• calcium and magnesium carbonates

• silicates and clays

• bound sulfate

• organic matter derived from soils and plant decay

Together, these components typically account for well over eighty to ninety-five percent of what settles out. This is why water engineers often describe floc as a scaffold whose job is to gather, bind, and carry other things out of suspension, and not as anything toxic.

What Should Not Reassure You

The core issue for me is that, although these materials are not classified as toxins, their presence in these forms are not “natural” or “neutral,” and thus should not necessarily be reassuring.

In clean, coherent water systems, undisturbed springs, intact aquifers, you can find similarly named substances (albeit in different forms and compounds) that remain dissolved, balanced, and biologically compatible. They do not collapse into particulates or act as scaffolding and they do not settle.

The main point of this post is that, if something settles out of the water, it tells you it never should have been there, or, more accurately, the modern world has modified it into some new form compared to the form that the otherwise harmless sounding elemental compound would exist as in nature.

The Small Fraction That Matters Most

The contaminants people worry about, things like microplastics, PFAS, pesticides, endocrine disruptors, pharmaceutical residues, are real, and they do appear in the sediment. But those are almost always a very small fraction of its total mass, typically well under one percent.

Yes, by weight, the toxins are minor, but by biological significance, they raise much higher concern. Luckily, flocculation concentrates what is present in the water, thus making the invisible visible, and converting these contaminants into a removable mass.

When “Chemical” Stops Being A Useful Word

When I refer to a “chemical burden,” I am not using the word chemical to literally mean synthetic, toxic, or unnatural. Let’s be calm and clear here: even a mineral is a “chemical” when using the strict, scientific definition.

At its most basic level, a chemical is any substance with a defined composition and structure. By that definition, everything made of matter is chemical: water, oxygen, sodium chloride, quartz, hemoglobin, ATP, and yes, minerals. Calcium carbonate is a chemical. Magnesium sulfate is a chemical. Silicon dioxide is a chemical.

But that is a scientific definition and not the “biological” one most people use. My sense is that in everyday language, when people say chemical they mean something synthetic, industrial, toxic, foreign, or something added to nature rather than arising from it.

Calling minerals “chemicals” is technically correct but biologically meaningless unless the form, context, or behavior is specified.

I feel that the best distinction between chemical and non-chemical is to think of each as ordered or disordered, lattice-bound or freely reactive, biologically coherent or biologically disruptive.

Let’s go through some examples:

• Calcium locked into a crystalline lattice behaves very differently than calcium stripped into excess ionic form.

• Aluminum bound into silicate minerals behaves very differently than aluminum present as free hydroxide complexes.

All are “chemicals.” Only some are biologically appropriate. My argument is that modern water contains:

• chemicals in the wrong forms

• chemicals in the wrong ratios

• chemicals in the wrong redox states

• chemicals liberated from their natural structural context

• chemicals behaving in ways biology did not evolve to handle continuously

Ultimately, although natural solid minerals are technically chemicals, when they are stripped from their natural order and forced into reactive forms, they stop behaving like nutrients and can instead start behaving like stressors.

When Minerals Lose Their Place

Mining, agriculture, water treatment chemistry, infrastructure corrosion, acidification, and altered redox conditions have displaced minerals from lattices into free or loosely bound ionic forms. Metals that biology expects to encounter as constrained structural elements now appear as reactive participants.

And here is where the rubber hits the road; minerals in such forms can compete at enzyme binding sites, interfere with membrane transporters, displace magnesium or zinc in metalloproteins, and catalyze redox reactions that increase local oxidative stress. There you have it.

Chronic Disruption Without Poisoning

Their presence does not automatically produce overt toxicity. The issue is that, over time, this creates a state of chronic and inappropriate biological availability, increasing the burden of “oxidative stress,” a central driver of inflammation, dysfunction, aging, and disease, particularly when present at non-physiologic concentrations or in inappropriate biological compartments.

A similar disruption occurs with organic compounds like synthetic surfactants, chelators, and disinfectant byproducts. These are the substance that are used to keep molecules soluble when normal water biology would typically precipitate or degrade them. “Chelators” prevent their sequestering while disinfectants stabilize compounds that should break down. Surfactants can carry organics across membranes and into places they were never meant to go.

The result is not poisoning in the classic sense. It is chronic disruption: distorted mineral signaling, altered enzyme kinetics, mitochondrial redox imbalance, and microbiome shifts that never trigger regulatory alarms because no single substance exceeds a toxic threshold.

Ultimately, the problem is not what these substances are, it is what they have been turned into.

What Sediment Is Revealing

In that sense, the sediment is a material record of what the water was quietly carrying all along. When people ask what’s in the sediment, the most honest answer is this:

“mostly minerals, along with a concentrated archive of everything modern civilization has forced water to carry”

The more material that settles, the more the source water has been pushed out of equilibrium by oxidation, treatment chemistry, agricultural runoff, industrial residues, or aging infrastructure.

At this point, my view shifted from initially being somewhat reassured to one of feeling warned.

What Remains After the Burden Is Removed

During my research into mineral chemistry and water behavior, I encountered Shimanishi’s sulfated biotite mineral complexes because they addressed a problem this post has defined repeatedly: modern water carries a chemically stabilized burden that biology never evolved to process continuously. I had already been using an identical mineral system to remove this burden from our household water before founding Aurmina and loved it, and that is why I started the company.

After flocculation and filtration, the remaining water is not stripped or inert, as with reverse osmosis or distillation. It retains a lighter, cleaner ionic profile: low-level ionic calcium and magnesium, trace iron and aluminum at or below detection, sulfate-coordinated multivalent ions, and minimal organic interference.

That is exactly what one of the world’s leading water contamination experts, Paul Rosenfeld’s ICP-MS analysis, found (covered in this prior post). Minerals were still present amd in forms water water could “structure” around rather than be destabilized by.

Fun fact: Rosenfeld volunteered, without pay, to perform the analysis driven by scientific curiosity, specifically, to see whether the proposed purification mechanisms of Themarox-derived solutions would withstand laboratory testing.

Ultimately, what interferes with water coherence is disordered mineral load: particulate hydroxides, carbonates, colloids, fine clays, excess monovalent salts, and organic debris. It disrupts exclusion-zone formation, collapses charge organization, and degrades functional hydration (it is this latter limitation that applies to R.O and distilled water as well).

Shimanishi’s extract does not remove minerals to induce structure. It removes mineral disorder so structure can stabilize. In the most elegant view (which is what initially pulled me into an exploration of the science behind it), it performs an “addition by subtraction.” Following treatment, electrical conductivity rises, oxidation–reduction potential stabilizes, exclusion-zone behavior becomes detectable, and total dissolved solids often increase. It becomes a medium that not only carries charge but organizes it.

What settles out during flocculation is not “the minerals,” but mineral chaos: excess hydroxides, carbonates, clays, silicates, and organic residues displaced from their natural context. What remains is water capable of coherent behavior—electrically active, chemically ordered, and biologically compatible.

Where Aurmina Fits

Practically, I think of Aurmina as a last line of defense. It offers protection from everything modern industrial society is adding to, and keeping in, your water by allowing you to make it visible and removable. It intervenes at a point between the faucet and when it reaches your lips and begins its journey to each of your cells. The beauty of it all is that it gives you a water that is not “pure but dead,” but one more like that of pristine, undisturbed mountain springs (however few there are left).

Closing

Modern water safety prioritizes invisibility. If substances remain dissolved, tasteless, odorless, and below regulatory thresholds, they are treated as negligible. Biology does not operate on thresholds alone. It responds to cumulative exposure, chemical form, and structural context.

When mineral context is restored, water stops behaving as a simple stabilized solvent and resumes behavior as a chemical and biological system. In doing so, it tells the truth about where it has been.

Once revealed, that truth cannot be unseen.

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If you value the late nights and deep dives into all the “rabbit holes” I then write about (or the Op-Eds and lectures I try to get out to the public), supporting my work is greatly appreciated.

More Stuff: Aurmina and Book Publications

If you want to learn more about the water purifier we made from Shimanishi’s volcanic-mineral complex, go to Aurmina.com where we are running a 25% off end-of year sale, code: HOLIDAY.

Upcoming Book Publications

Yup — not one, but two books are dropping from yours truly (at the same time? What?)

1. If, instead of (or in addition to) these Substack posted chapters, you prefer the feel of a real book, or the smell of paper, or like to give holiday gifts, pre-order From Volcanoes to Vitality, my grand mineral saga, shipping end of January.

2. And if you want to read (or gift) another chronicle of suppression, science, and survival, grab The War on Chlorine Dioxide—the sequel you didn’t see coming—shipping early to mid-January. On this one, I say: “Buy it before they ban it.” Hah!